GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR

COUNTDOWN TO ANNIHILATION: GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR
In both Germany and Rwanda the use of ethnically marked identity cards became central in the
implementation of the genocide. For the vast majority of Rohingya, the absence of an identity card or
the possession of a white or green identity card marks them out as people without citizenship and
entitlement.
Dehumanisation and stigmatisation techniques are reinforced through segregation and systematic
isolation. 275 Social and physical exclusion are key elements of genocide controlled by the state. In
Germany, Jews were banned from public places, excluded from work in a wide range of professions,
ghettoised and later forced into concentration camps where they were systematically weakened to
the point of death. In the Rohingya camps, villages and Aung Mingalar ghetto a deeply weakened and
traumatised population endures the barest of lives and denial of basic human rights with the ever-present
fear of violent attack.
In addition to a high level of cooperation between the state security forces and the bureaucracy, the participation
and complicity of the majority of the local population is a necessary prerequisite for genocide. 276
Once a group has been classified and clearly identifiable or segregated in ghetto and camp-like spaces,
the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is physically reinforced. The state and its proxies can then continue
with an unhindered programme of dehumanisation aimed at securing the complicity of the local
population through a combination of propaganda, coercion and terror. The Rakhine people, who themselves
have suffered decades of oppression and neglect at the hands of the Myanmar government to
the point where their own culture is under threat, are particularly receptive to nationalist and religious
propaganda.
In Myanmar’s genocidal process, two stages remain: extermination and ‘symbolic enactment’. While
extermination or mass killing on the scale of the German, Rwandan, Kosovan or Cambodian genocides
is not inevitable, it cannot be ruled out. This report demonstrates that the infrastructure and ideological
base for mass killings exist, and that the elimination of the Rohingya, though not always visible, is well
under way. Myanmar’s Rohingya are being slowly annihilated through sporadic massacres, mass flight,
systematic weakening and denial of identity.
Elements of ‘symbolic enactment’ are also present – not least in the state’s elimination and denial of the
‘Rohingya’ ethnicity and its effective removal of the word from the lexicon of the Myanmar language.
This report concludes with an urgent warning to civil society in Myanmar, to international civil society,
to the government of Myanmar and to international states. A genocidal process is underway in Myanmar
and if it follows the path outlined in this report, it is yet to be completed. It can be stopped but not without
confronting the fact that it is, indeed, a genocide.
The government is not killing us with guns but is indirectly killing us through a lack of healthcare
and forcing us to leave to third countries. We are prisoners, living in a prison. We are not
getting a normal food supply. We have no education here. We have nothing here. How can we
continue with life here? 277
275 Lecomte, J M, Teaching about the Holocaust, p. 49.
276 Mukimbiri, J, ‘The Seven Stages of the Rwandan Genocide’, p. 823.
277 Rohingya man, Thae Chaung, IDP camp 7 November 2014.
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