Myanmar: a question of genocide
This time last year it was an empty stretch of forest, a place where elephants roamed, said Fay Griegson in The Sunday Times. Today, Cox’s Bazar, which lies inside Bangladesh on the border with Myanmar, is a makeshift metropolis of tarpaulins and bamboo – “a monument to the persecution of an entire people”. The world’s largest refugee camp, it houses almost a million Rohingya – the Muslim minority who have lived for generations in Myanmar, but whom the country’s Buddhist majority see as interlopers from Bangladesh, and who last year fled here in vast numbers to escape the gang rape and mass murder inflicted on them by the Burmese army in their home state of Rakhine.
Now, on the anniversary of that brutal military crackdown, a UN report accuses Myanmar’s commander in chief and five other generals of war crimes and acting “with genocidal intent”, said The Times. It also accuses Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, a past winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, of failing to use her “moral authority” to stop the violence. But will the generals be brought to justice? Unlikely. The obvious place to prosecute them would be the International Criminal Court at The Hague, but any referral must be agreed by the UN Security Council; China, which regards Myanmar as its own backyard (it’s building a high-speed rail link there) would be sure to use its veto to prevent that. Nor is much to be gained by leaning on Suu Kyi. She may once have been revered as a champion of human rights, said Azeem Ibrahim on Channel News Asia, but she has gone out of her way to defend the generals’ actions. Even if she’s not personally in favour of the campaign against the Rohingya (as she seems to be), she lacks the power to rein in the military. Forcing her to take a firmer line puts what little progress Myanmar has made towards democracy at risk, and may throw it further into China’s orbit.
But it may be worth putting pressure on another institution that the UN has held up for blame, said The Guardian. In 2012, barely 1% of Myanmar’s population were even online: today 18 million are on Facebook and it has become the central tool for whipping up ethnic hatred. There have been thousands of posts calling for the Rohingya’s extermination – urging they be burnt alive or fed to pigs. Yet Facebook had only a handful of Burmese speakers monitoring this. It’s not good enough. Mark Zuckerberg is in many ways more powerful in Myanmar than the UN secretary general. He has to do more to stop the spread of mob violence.