Posted on by Daniel Philpott

Yes, It’s Genocide; Yes, It’s Religious — The Case of the Rohingya Muslims

Last week, I covered the case of the Uighur Muslims in China. The Rohingya Muslims in Burma are also an egregious case where Muslims are denied their religious freedom — in this case, in the context of what is arguably genocide.

The Religious Freedom Institute has just released an excellent report on the violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma. The report shows that the violence is widespread in scale, warranting a genocide designation, that is strongly religious in character, and that it severely violates religious freedom. It covers violence against other peoples in Burma as well. It is produced by RFI’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, of which I am a member (though I had no hand in the report).

Here is the report’s summary:

Nearly one year ago, on August 25, 2017, a wave of violence was unleashed against Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State, Burma. Thousands were killed in brutal fashion and more than 700,000 were displaced. In a new report, the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) considers the facts of what happened in August 2017 and the broader context of religious freedom violations in Burma. The report also puts forward concrete recommendations on what is to be done.

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The Rohingya Crisis: The Shameful Global Response to Genocide and the Assault on Religious Freedom  adds to the mounting documentation of the plight of the Rohingya, an ethnic and religious minority of Burma (Myanmar) and is a call to action.

This report should serve as a reminder of the needs of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who flooded into Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Burmese military attacks in August 2017. While the influx of refugees has largely subsided, the needs of the individuals, families, and communities who survived the crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide perpetrated by the government because of ethnicity and religion still remain.

The Rohingya are not alone in their endurance of blatant attacks to their rights to religious freedom. Christians among the Kachin, Chin, and the marginalized Naga communities of Burma face are still facing rights restrictions. They are once again seeing targeted military campaigns, in some cases perpetrated by the very same units who targeted the Rohingya.

This report is in response to the unresolved refugee and humanitarian crisis that extends beyond the Rohingya and threatens to be forgotten. The report provides an overview of the historical, ethno-religious, humanitarian, and international dimensions of this particular crisis, and emphasizes that the overwhelming evidence merits the label of genocide and crimes against humanity be applied to the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya by the Burmese military and other actors.

Regardless of what label is applied, the evidence of atrocities against the Rohingya is overwhelming. In light of such evidence, the Burmese government and international community must ask themselves, are they unaware or unconcerned about the genocide being perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslims of Burma?

These violations of religious freedom and acts of genocide against the Rohingya of Burma cannot go unanswered. The international community, individual governments, and faith leaders and their congregants around the world, must not be silent in the face of such a blatant assault on religious freedom and such a violent act of genocide.

Meanwhile, a compelling piece on the Rohingyas appeared in National Review by Nina Shea, who has been one of the world’s leading advocates for international religious freedom for over a quarter of a century. The nub of her case is here:

Since 1999, Burma has been designated a severe and systematic religious persecutor under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act. Its ethnic Rohingya Muslim and Kachin, Chin, and Karen Christian minorities have been regularly oppressed and subjected to brutal attempts of forcible conversion by its Buddhist majority. Violent conflict between them and a military bent on “Burmanization” has raged on and off since the country’s 1948 independence from Britain.

In 2012, the attacks against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s northern Rakhine state became particularly intense. That year, Genocide Watch issued an emergency alert that these Rohingya were being slaughtered and driven from their homes. On May 20, 2013, noted human-rights advocates Jose Ramos Horta, Muhammad Yunus, and Benedict Rogers wrote of these early warning signs of genocide in the New York Times:

The Rohingyas were recognized until the 1982 Citizenship Law stripped them of their citizenship and rendered them stateless. Since then, they have faced a slow-burning campaign of persecution, which exploded last June and again in October, resulting in the deaths of at least 1,000 and the displacement of at least 130,000. . . . Human Rights Watch has published evidence of mass graves and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In 2015, amid continuing horrific news accounts from Rakhine, the prestigious Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School produced a legal analysis finding “strong evidence of genocide against the Rohingya population,” based on “the record of anti-Rohingya rhetoric from government officials and Buddhist leaders, the policies that specifically target Rohingya, and the mass scale of the abuses against Rohingya [that] make it difficult to avoid inferring an intent to destroy Rohingya.” By 2016, 93,000 Rohingya had been killed, brutalized, raped, or forcibly displaced, according to the UNHCR.

  She calls on the U.S. Secretary of State to designate the crisis genocide.