Diplomats Fail to Criticize Rohingya Purge
YANGON, Myanmar — It is unfolding again: Troops have unleashed fire and rape and indiscriminate slaughter on a vulnerable minority, driving hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee and creating a humanitarian emergency that crosses borders.
A crisis in Myanmar that many saw coming has brought a host of uncomfortable questions along with it: Why did the world — which promised “never again” after Rwanda and Bosnia, then Sudan and Syria — seemingly do so little to forestall an ethnic cleansing campaign by Myanmar’s military? And what can be done now to address the urgent humanitarian calamity caused when more than half of Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya Muslims have fled the country?
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, has urged “unfettered access” for international agencies and called the crisis “the world’s fastest- developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France has called it genocide. And there is talk of the European Union’s renewing sanctions on people culpable in the violence that has driven the Rohingya from Rakhine, a state in western Myanmar.
But in Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial capital, the diplomatic corps is still reluctant to publicly criticize either the military or the civilian administration led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
More than half a million Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh since late August, when a Rohingya militant attack on security posts catalyzed a brutal counteroffensive. Those who cannot flee are trapped and hungry in northern Rakhine. The government is preventing aid agencies from delivering relief supplies or even assessing need in the region.
Elections in 2015 elevated Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and seemed to usher in a chance for democracy to take hold. But whatever authority she has, as the nation’s state counselor, is dwarfed by that of the military that continues to monopolize power.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is not the one ordering Rohingya villages to be burned down. That firepower lies with the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.
Diplomats say Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi used to express sympathy for the Rohingya in private. But over the past year or so, she has begun implying that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. In a recent televised address, she promised to personally oversee efforts to bring peace to Rakhine and repatriate those who have fled to Bangladesh. But she said nothing about accusations that the military has unleashed arson, murder and rape on the Rohingya.
Observers of Myanmar’s military have warned that an international shaming of the Nobel laureate is just what the generals want.
“She gets all the criticism, and then the Tatmadaw gets to quietly do what it wants and what it has done for decades, which is to burn villages and terrorize ethnic areas,” said David Scott Mathieson, a longtime human-rights researcher in Myanmar.
Foreign envoys here are mindful of this. But Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, has grown impatient.
“I would like to disagree that it is a complicated situation,” he said. “It is very simple: When humanitarians are not allowed to help civilians, people die.”
International aid workers say they have never seen the situation so grave.
“I think their strategy is to starve them out,” said Brad Hazlett of Partners Relief and Development, a Christian charity.
Abul Hashim, a Rohingya in the village of Anauk Pyin, said by cellphone that a team of ambassadors and United Nations officials had visited on October 2 as part of a government-managed trip. They promised food aid to the village. But for nearly 10 days, Mr. Hashim said, his village received nothing. Until some aid arrived on the evening of October 11, all he, his wife, their three daughters and three sons had eaten that day was less than half a kilo of rice and some water.
“Our sorrows,” he said, “know no bounds.”
The world stands by as the rape and slaughter continue.