GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR

7. CONCLUSION
The Rohingya face the final stages of genocide. Decades of persecution have taken on a new and
intensified form since mass killings in 2012. The marked escalation in State-sponsored stigmatisation,
discrimination, violence and segregation, and the systematic weakening of the community, make
precarious the very existence of the Rohingya.
The report analyses the persecution of the Rohingya against the six stages of genocide outlined by Daniel
Feierstein: stigmatisation (and dehumanisation); harassment, violence and terror; isolation and segregation;
systematic weakening; mass annihilation; and finally symbolic enactment involving the removal
of the victim group from the collective history. The report concludes that the Rohingya have suffered the
first four of the six stages of genocide. They have been, and continue to be, stigmatized, dehumanised
and discriminated against. They have been harassed, terrorized and slaughtered. They have been isolated
and segregated into detention camps and securitised villages and ghettos. They have been systematically
weakened through hunger, illness, denial of civil rights and loss of livelihood. All of this places them at
high risk of annihilation.
The evidence documented reveals that these genocidal processes have been orchestrated at the highest
levels of State and local Rakhine government. They have been led by State officials, Rakhine politicians,
Buddhist monks and Rakhine civil society activists. The Rohingya have been subjected to a virulent and
official nationwide policy and propaganda campaign which has incrementally removed them from the
State’s sphere of responsibility. The State’s persistent and intensified ‘othering’ of the Rohingya as outsiders,
illegal Bengali immigrants and potential terrorists has given a green light to Rakhine nationalists
and Islamophobic monks to orchestrate invidious campaigns of race and religious hatred reminiscent of
those witnessed in Germany in the 1930s and Rwanda in the early 1990s.
The broader parallels with other genocides are stark and serve as a bleak and urgent warning. In
Rwanda, the state achieved its goal of mobilising ordinary Hutus to commit mass murder through
propaganda, terror techniques and the elimination of moderate Hutus and the political opposition. 274
The Sangha-led stigmatization of the Rohingya described in this report vividly recalls the Rwandan
government-backed propaganda campaigns, where the ‘othering’ had the effect of both mobilising and
desensitizing Hutu perpetrators to the mass killing of their Tutsi neighbours.
274 Newbury, D, ‘Understanding Genocide’, African Studies Review, 41(1), April 1998, p. 80.
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