COUNTDOWN TO ANNIHILATION: <strong>GENOCIDE</strong> <strong>IN</strong> <strong>MYANMAR</strong> PART I: <strong>IN</strong>TRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Rohingya child, Darpaing camp, Sittwe, November 2014 18
1. <strong>IN</strong>TRODUCTION In 2012, while researching civil society resistance to State violence and corruption in Myanmar, ISCI heard reports of widespread State-sanctioned violence and discrimination against Muslims in Myanmar’s north-western Rakhine state. The massacres that occurred that year were not – as the government maintained – simply the product of ‘inter-communal violence’. Rather, they were part of a long-term, systematic strategy by national and regional governments to remove the already persecuted Rohingya minority from the State’s realm of political, social, moral and physical obligation. 5 Significant steps in this strategy have included the removal in 1982 of Rohingya from the list of officially recognised ethnic minorities and stripping them of citizenship; the refusal to issue Rohingya babies with birth certificates since 1994; the government’s refusal even to use the term ‘Rohingya’ and to condemn anyone nationally or internationally who does so; the exclusion of Rohingya from the 2014 census; banning Rohingya from standing in the November 2015 elections; and the longstanding restrictions upon freedom of movement and denial of access to healthcare, employment opportunities and higher education. Myanmar has a long history of inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflict, State violence and repression, restrictions on population movement, and underdevelopment. Myanmar is religiously diverse but not religiously pluralistic. 6 The State has a dark legacy of oppression against all its ethnic minority people, including both the Rakhine and the Rohingya, but the Rohingya have been singled out for a particularly lethal form of torment. As a result, in Rakhine state, the relationship between Buddhists and Muslims has moved from mutual tolerance to open hostility – hostility primarily directed against Muslim Rohingya by Rakhine and Bamar (Burmese) 7 Buddhists. Rakhine state, the second poorest region in Myanmar, has experienced years of economic and developmental neglect. The Rakhine community, together with the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities living in the state, have suffered extreme poverty, inadequate access to education, healthcare and livelihood opportunities. As a result the Rakhine community harbours grievances against both the Myanmar 5 On the concept of the ‘universe of obligation’ and its centrality to genocide, see Fein, H, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust, (New York: Free Press, 1979). 6 Walton, M. J. and Hayward, S, ‘Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence’, Policy Studies 71, (Honolulu: East-West Center, 2014), p. 7: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/contestingbuddhist-narratives-democratization-nationalism-and-communal-violence-in-mya. Accessed 10 October 2015. 7 The term ‘Bamar’ refers to the largest of Myanmar’s ethnic groups from which the ruling elite is drawn. This is often used interchangeably with the terms ‘Burmese’ and ‘Burman’. 19
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