We Must Not Forget the Rohingya

Rohingya Muslims flee to Bangladesh (Reuters/Jorge Silva)

The plight of the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar has become an all but forgotten sideshow in the Western press and politics. The lives of over a million people have been destroyed, with Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur levels of mass murder, mass rape and village razing successfully ethnically cleansing the Rohingya people with minimal consequences. Last October, the British government’s representative Mark Field told the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee that the their policy of pushing for the return of refugees was intended to prevent Myanmar from seeing its campaign to have been successful. This argument was so clearly naïve, and hindsight now simply confirms the fears of people such as myself who were in that meeting or watched it unfold that Britain and the wider West would fail the Rohingya people.

The campaign of ethnic cleansing was, as described by the UN, ‘textbook’. Myanmar intended from the start to forcibly remove the ethnolinguistic Muslim Rohingya group from Rakhine state - forcing them over the border to Bangladesh with brutal efficiency. The fate of those who remained is still unknown, but images released by Amnesty International show scores of bulldozed villages. Where the Rohingya once resided, there is now only earth.

It is plausible that Genocide has taken place in Myanmar. Reuters published a report in February revealing how the military had executed a group of men in Rakhine state, confirming the stories of refugees who say this has been common throughout the campaign. In Srebrenica in the 1990s, 7,000 people were executed in a campaign which international lawyers defined as genocide. In Myanmar, current estimates put the death toll at nearly 7,00 - a figure generally considered to be conservative.

Burmese authorities have bulldozed areas on which Rohingya villages once stood. Under Myanmar law if a house burns down, the land on which it stood returns to the state. Undercover photos from within Myanmar have shown the remaining Rohingya to have been moved to secure ‘villages’ eerily similar to Nazi Germany’s 1940s camps across Eastern Europe. The fate of those people is completely unknown, and the steps toward genocide, shown by a 2015 report from Queen Mary University London, are still ongoing. Devastatingly, it would not come as a surprise if those people are exterminated in the near future. Some Rohingya say this is already happening, with Myanmar carrying out a campaign of mass murder through systematic starvation.

Talks between Myanmar and Bangladesh continue with the goal of ending this crisis. Bangladeshi authorities have discussed the possibility of moving Rohingya refugees to a new island in the Bay of Bengal. This island is practically uninhabitable, and will be vulnerable to the Monsoon rains due in the coming months. Refugees would be exposed to the harshest of environments. Having been systematically killed, raped and starved in their own country, they would now be forced to live in squalor in the Bay of Bengal.

The repatriation agreement of February 2018 failed, and Bangladesh is echoing Myanmar’s opinion that Rohingya are not welcome in their country. To rely upon these two developing states to safely secure the future of the Rohingya is a mistake of the largest degree, and the failure of international institutions in protecting the Rohingya cannot be understated. If we are to avoid permanent refugee camps inhabited by Palestinians since 1948, or the extermination of those held in concentration camps akin to 1940s Europe, then the world has to do more. If not, we will once more be responsible for allowing for the deaths of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocents where it is entirely preventable.