In this file photo taken on October 6, 2017 Rohingya refugees take
shelter from the rain at Nayapara refugee camp in Bangladesh's Ukhia
district. Humanitarian agencies have been warning for months about the
danger posed by the impending 2018 monsoon, due to start in June, to the
welfare of refugees who live cheek by jowl in cramped tents on
hillsides, following a mass exodus from Myanmar in 2017. Source: Fred
Dufour / AFP
TWO laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize have publicly called mass
violence against Rohingya Muslims in Burma (Myanmar) “genocide” after
making a visit to refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh earlier this
year.
Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi and Yemeni journalist Tawakkol Karman last
week co-wrote an opinion piece in the prominent Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in which they described their eyewitness accounts of the “fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world today.”
The two women visited Rohingya refugees in late February along with the
Nobel Women Initiative and have vowed to fight for justice on behalf of
the persecuted Muslim group. “Nothing could have prepared us for what we
saw and heard,” they wrote.
“The systematic use of the most brutal and dehumanising forms of
violence that we witnessed in the Bangladesh camps should awaken us all
to the fact that what is happening to the Rohingya has a name: It is
genocide.”
Humanitarian agencies have said that at least 687,000 Rohingya refugees
have fled Rakhine State into Cox’s Bazar in since Aug 25 last year in
response to so-called “clearing operations” by the Tatmadaw army.
Security forces and Buddhist vigilantes stand accused of mass killings,
rape and arson in Muslim villages amid a campaign described by the UN
human rights chief as a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing.
Burma’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi – herself a Nobel laureate once seen as a
human rights champion – has been heavily criticised by many in the
international community for failing to stop alleged atrocities against
the Rohingya or defend their rights.
This picture taken on April 6, 2018, shows Myanmar’s State Counselor
Aung San Suu Kyi (C), President Win Myint (R) and First Lady Cho Cho
(2nd-L) taking part in reception following the swearing-in ceremony of
the new government in Naypyitaw. Source: Thet Aung / AFP
Fellow laureates Malala Yousafzai and Desmond Tutu have are also among those who have publicly criticised Suu Kyi.
“More than 100 women told us how the Myanmar security forces burned
villages, tortured, killed and systematically raped women and girls,”
wrote Ebadi and Karman. Many medical aid organisations and rights groups
have similarly documented widespread sexual violence against Rohingya
girls and women.
The UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in
Conflict recently added Burma’s military to a blacklist of organisations
known to use sexual violence amid armed conflict, stating that rape was
a “calculated tool” against the Rohingyas.
The authors also quoted Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s special envoy to Burma Bob Rae’s recent report,
stating that: “the lesson of history is that genocide is not an event
like a bolt of lightning. It is a process, one that starts with hate
speech and the politics of exclusion, then moves to legal
discrimination, then policies of removal, and then finally to a
sustained drive to physical extermination.”
Rae’s report, entitled Tell them we’re human,
argued that Canada should hold Burmese government officials, the
military and vigilante groups accountable for committing “crimes against
humanity” against the Rohingya, while arguing against sanctions against
the long isolated Southeast Asian country.
“Ending the genocide against the Rohingya is a global imperative, and
urgently requires robust, concrete leadership from Canada,” wrote Karman
and Ebadi.
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