On Monday the United Nations issued a report concluding that six Burmese military officials should be investigated for genocide and crimes against humanity. The report is worded cautiously, but its meaning is plain: The Burmese military is actively attempting to wipe out an entire people group—namely the Muslim Rohingyas of the Rakhine State, along Burma’s western coast.
The conflict exploded anew when Rohingya militants attacked border posts nearly two years ago. That was all the excuse the Burmese military needed to launch a brutal campaign of violence against Rohingya Muslims in August 2017. Burmese security forces and armed civilians attacked hundreds of Rohingya villages. The government described these as “clearance operations” born of “military necessity.” According to witness accounts, they killed children, lit the dead on fire, burned homes to the ground, and raped girls and women. More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh for refuge. As the U.N. report notes, “Military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang raping women, assaulting children, and burning entire villages.” (Two Reuters reporters were arrested in December of last year for investigating these and similar crimes in the Rakhine State village of Inn Din; they were put on trial earlier this year and await the government’s decision.)
Rohingya have long faced discrimination in Buddhist-majority Burma, where they are denied citizenship and have little access to basic medical care. Other ethnic and religious minority groups have also faced persecution, including Kachin Christians.
The country, for decades under military rule, today has a part-civilian government. But the military still controls a quarter of the seats in parliament, making constitutional reform near impossible. It also handles the ministries of defense, border affairs, and home affairs.
For a short period in 2015, it appeared Burma had turned toward a brighter political future. The National League for Democracy (NLD), with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi at the fore, won the national elections that year. In late 2016 President Barack Obama, pretending that his policy of “engagement” had paid off and claiming the country had made “substantial progress in improving human rights,” resumed government aid to Burma—an embarrassingly naive move that happened while vicious anti-Rohingya violence was still happening. Amazing what the administration of John Kerry and Samantha Power was willing to wink at.
Suu Kyi has largely failed even to condemn the atrocities against the Rohingya. Her supporters say her position as de jure leader is precarious, and the military—which, it’s true, she does not control—closely guards its broad powers. Maybe. But Suu Kyi has taken few risks to stop the killing.
According to the non-profit human rights group Fortify Rights, Burmese authorities “made extensive and systematic preparations for the commission of mass atrocity crimes” against the Rohingya before the brutal August 2017 attacks. That includes “systematically training and arming non-Rohingya residents in northern Rakhine” months in advance, confiscating objects that could be used as defensive weapons, demolishing fencing around Rohingya homes, and cutting off access to humanitarian aid.
In November of last year, the Trump administration said the crisis amounts to an ethnic cleansing. We’re told the State Department is preparing a report detailing the violent campaign against the Rohingya. That report, which we hope will be released to the public within days rather than weeks or month, will almost certainly support the UN report’s indirect assertion that the Burmese government is carrying out genocide.
What’s to be done? The U.N. report’s suggestion that Burmese military officials be tried in the International Criminal Court is well-intentioned but hopelessly optimistic.
The U.S. administration is signaling an intention not to ignore the genocide. On August 17 the Trump administration imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on two Burmese military units and four Burmese commanders for human rights abuses, describing the move as a “warning.” That’s encouraging, but cutting off a few Burmese officials’ access to the world financial system likely don’t affect them in the way they affect, say, the Russian oligarchs who prop up Vladimir Putin.
We hope the administration’s next step will be to reimpose the government aid sanctions lifted in 2016, but outright genocide calls for far more aggressive punishments than withholding aid. Magnitsky sanctions will need to be liberally imposed if they’re to have any effect. Economic sanctions have a role, too. U.S. consumers buy tens of millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry and precious stones from Burma every year—blocking those imports should get the government’s attention. The United States can’t stop every instance of state-sponsored massacre, but we can make a lot of trouble for the perpetrators.
