The Rohingya, residents of Myanmar's Rakhine State, are the most persecuted minority in the world. Although the Myanmar government considers the Rohingya as British colonial and post-colonial migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, "A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire" by Francis Buchanan (1799) -- which was found and republished by Michael Charney in the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research in 2003 -- says, among the native groups of Arakan, there are the "Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan.”
The Classical Journal of 1811 identified "Rooinga" as one of the languages spoken in the "Burmah Empire." In 1815, Johann Severin Vater listed "Ruinga" as an ethnic group with a distinct language in a compendium of languages published in German.
Blatantly ignoring history, the Rohingya are still regarded as illegal immigrants and non-citizens by Myanmar. Persecution of the Rohingya, thus, crossed any conceivable limits. Violent, large-scale crackdowns targeted toward the Rohingya -- like Operation King Dragon in 1978, and Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation in 1991 -- forced hundreds upon thousands of Rohingya to flee Burma and into Bangladesh.
August 25, 2023 marks six years of the most current, and possibly most violent, wave of anti-Rohingya persecution, which began in 2017, when the military of Myanmar launched merciless onslaught against the Rohingya community. The head of the UN agency for human rights later referred to the military's conduct as "acts of horrific barbarity," potential "acts of genocide," and "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing." The persecution forced nearly a million Rohingya to flee to neighbouring countries in both South and Southeast Asia.
In a study conducted in January 2018 with a total of 3,321 Rohingya refugee households in Cox's Bazar, a UN Fact-Finding Mission estimated that the military and the local Rakhine population had killed at least 25,000 Rohingya and committed gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against 18,000 Rohingya women and girls. According to their estimates, 36,000 Rohingya were burned alive and 116,000 others were beaten, an atrocities unseen since 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The current situation
Rakhine State still houses an estimated 600,000 Rohingya who are vulnerable to violence and persecution, confined to camps and communities with no freedom of movement and excluded from adequate food, health care, education, and employment opportunities. While over a million Rohingya refugees who sought sanctuary in Bangladesh today reside in precarious housing with uncertain futures. Additionally, Bangladesh has never received significant financial aid for Rohingya refugees. Instead, the level of support has been dwindling over time.
Bangladesh received somewhat more than 50% in 2022, while donors provided only 60% of the necessary funding in 2020, down from about 72% to 75% two years earlier. The 2023 appeal, which requested $876 million, is only 24.6% funded as of June 1, making Rohingya refugees particularly vulnerable this year.
Funding for other protracted crises in 2022 and 2023 seems to coincide with overwhelming political interest in, and donor pledges for, Ukraine. For instance, while the 2021 Afghanistan Humanitarian Response Plan was very well funded at 112.8%, in 2022 it has received less than 50% of its funding appeal.
Since January 2022, the US government has committed more than $76.8 billion assistance to Ukraine. The 2022 “Stand Up for Ukraine” global pledging campaign raised $8.9bn. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric stated: “This is among the fastest and most generous responses a humanitarian flash appeal has ever received.”
At the 2022 international donor conference on Yemen -- a country of 23.4 million people in dire crisis with war and famine -- the UN appealed for $4.3bn for humanitarian aid. World leaders offered less than one-third of that. This so-called “aid void” is increasing for Myanmar, Sahel, and Ethiopia.
To get relief from the unrelentingly grim conditions in which they are forced to live, either as refugees in crowded camps over the border in Bangladesh -- or subjected to discrimination and restrictions on their movement in Myanmar or in an effort to find protection, security, family reunification, and livelihoods in other countries -- they're attempting perilous sea journeys in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and other.
According to the UN refugee agency’s January data, more than 3,500 Rohingya in 39 vessels attempted crossings the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal in 2022, up from 700 the previous year, which caused at least 348 Rohingya deaths or went missing at sea in 2022, making it one of the deadliest years since 2014.
Repatriation attempts
Beginning with the signing of a repatriation agreement on November 23, 2017, the first effort at repatriation was launched -- a precise repatriation process or a deadline for its completion were still undecided. Creating conducive conditions for the Rohingya to return was the goal of a tripartite agreement between the UN Development Program, UNHCR, and the Myanmar government in June 2018. Due to the Rohingyas' mistrust of the Myanmar government, repatriation attempts in November 2018 and August 2019 were likewise unsuccessful.
Bangladesh suggested a village-based repatriation plan in January 2021 to give the Rohingya confidence in their ability to return. Both nations picked up the negotiations again in January 2022, one year later. From the list of 8,30,000 Rohingya being protected in Bangladesh, Myanmar indicated it would want to begin the process by repatriating 42,000 refugees, but that too had failed.
In March of this year, under China's mediation, Bangladesh and Myanmar cane to an agreement for a pilot initiative to return Rohingya. The Rohingya and the Myanmar Junta supported this pilot initiative, but the United States, the West, and other human rights organizations denounced this effort because there is currently no democracy in Myanmar. Thus, this newest effort is also about to fail.
Justice for the Rohingya
Genocide cases are ongoing in the ICJ, ICC, the Argentine International court, and the Indonesian and German courts against the Junta. But this will take years to reach a verdict. Though the latest report of the UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), published in August 2023, says it has prepared over 23 million information items, including witness statements, documents, photographs, videos, forensic evidence and satellite imagery of Junta's increasingly frequent and brazen war crimes, due to the geo-political interest and the presence of China and Russia, the US and the West remain on sanction-based steps for Myanmar.
A month after Russia's escalated invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, the ICC Prosecutor declared that the court would be looking into suspected crimes there. A strong warning against committing crimes in Ukraine was swiftly issued by the ICC Prosecutor as well. There have been no comparable, forceful public remarks from the ICC regarding Myanmar. Additionally, other states' prosecutions have not received the same level of public support. This is a cause for worry, especially in light of the perception that prosecutions, arrest warrants, and remarks from the ICC Prosecutor may have a preventive effect, particularly during an active conflict.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on March 16, 2023, the UN special envoy to Myanmar Noeleen Heyzer said that the situation is “devastating.” Clear evidence for this lack of action can be seen in the junta’s recent massacres, indiscriminate aerial bombardments and artillery strikes, mass arson attacks, and new horrors in the forms of beheadings and dismemberment of detained resistance members and civilians.
According to the NUG report, the regime has committed at least 144 massacres since 2021 including 48 massacres between January and July this year and killed 1,595 civilians around the country. In another report compiled by “Data for Myanmar” says a total of 70,324 houses nationwide were burned down by the military junta from May 2021 to May 2023, with the highest in Sagaing Region. All these caused nearly 1.9 million internally displaced persons in Myanmar, says the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.
Under the direction of Min Aung Hlaing, junta security forces have committed crimes against humanity against protesters, journalists, lawyers, medical personnel, and members of the political opposition by engaging in mass executions, torture, sexual assault, arbitrary arrests, and other abuses. The nature of the security force crackdown -- methodical, widespread, and systematic -- reflects the junta’s country-wide policy of suppressing the opposition.
When centralized commands and high-level culprits carry out mass atrocities, the international community absolutely possesses the resources and understands what to do. In order to broaden the scope of the prosecutor's ongoing investigation to include just crimes committed on the territory of Myanmar, the Security Council should refer the case to the ICC, as it did in the cases of Sudan and Libya.
Or, the council can also establish an ad hoc tribunal and give it the authority to look into and prosecute crimes committed against all of Myanmar's ethnic minorities, as it did in the wake of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. A regional nation may suggest a special tribunal or a third-party state may call for the extradition of alleged criminals, both of which actions helped bring the dictator of Chad to trial and conviction. The international community should, at the very least, end all military and business ties with the Tatmadaw's commanders.
The pursuit of stability in Myanmar is far too frequently perceived as being hampered by justice and accountability. The Tatmadaw will continue its longstanding practice of using all of Myanmar's ethnic minority as scapegoats and targets until justice for all is achieved since that is the only way to go forward.
Nur-Mohammad Sheikh is a security affairs analyst.
