The Rohingya genocide and our double standards

By Aliyu Musa

As part of an MA coursework in 2004 I worked in a group of students that researched and analysed Myanmar’s brutish military rule in a class presentation. Aung San Suu Kyi’s unending and unwarranted incarceration stood out in our findings. Her resilience and resoluteness in the face of apparent hopelessness were very inspiring, which was why I found myself effortlessly buying into and, in my small, perhaps insignificant way, lending a voice to the campaign to liberate Burma, including Aung San Suu Kyi and the trampled Rohingya minority.

That campaign, fired across the globe by the clout of the media, especially the ever vociferous western media, has since paid off. And Aung San Suu Kyi has effectively morphed and reversed roles. She is now a comfortable front row sitter in the highly privileged club of Myanmar’s oppressors, alongside her former jailers and gladly parrying allegations of Rights abuses.

For the millions of pro-democracy activists and Human Rights campaigners from all walks of life that offered an unbroken accent to ignite the fire that wrestled power from Myanmar’s military Aung San Suu Kyi’s election in 2015 was the icing on the cake. And with it, it was logically hoped, freedom would come for all Myanmarese.

But the Rohingya minority’s plight has remained unchanged. They are the perpetual downtrodden of Myanmar, for whom no sympathies are spared, no voices are given and, even in death, no epitaphs are penned. They are our 21st Century world’s most beleaguered, even by the UN description.

The Rohingya Burmese’s predicament predates Aung San Suu Kyi’s incarceration, release or even her 2015 victory at the poll. It dates back to centuries when they migrated from the Indian subcontinent to the Rakhine area of Myanmar. It was a continuous migration that had been intensified by the spread of the major religions in the region – Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam.

But, despite settling down in Myanmar and living with the Buddhist majority for countless decades, they are continuously denied the right of abode, regarded as stateless and subjected to unending torments.

Blamed for what the state calls terrorism, due to the activities of a handful of dissidents, often, the peace loving majority, most of whom are Muslim plus a small number of Hindu, are collectively punished in the name of fighting terrorism. And in the process, children, women and even unborn babies are made to pay costly prices; crimes the previously lucid Aung San Suu Kyi dismisses with a wave of the hand, to the unambiguous dismay of her once unwavering admirers.

Aung San Suu Kyi, in her new role as Burma’s brutes’ mouthpiece, cares not a hoot as she rationalises human butchery, excuses infanticide, and even justifies genocide. She sees nothing wrong with the horrendous atrocities against the Rohingya children and women and the aged who travel through landmines and deadly sea routes in search of an obviously elusive safety.

She, definitely, believes fighting terror justifiably comes with costs and the Rohingya are the collateral on whom no sympathies should be squandered. And this, she says, is because most of the tales of their angst are implausible. But she would let neither the UN rapporteurs nor independent Human Rights observers or aid workers access Rakhine and the anguished and stuck Rohingya to verify her or their story.

So, for the Rohingya it’s a long-drawn battle with relentless persecutors who, sadly though, enjoy the unalloyed patience of the hypocritical liberal world and media that only two decades ago turned the other way while hundreds were slaughtered in Rwanda and Srebrenica.

The Rohingya must, as a matter of fact, realise that ours is a duplicitous world and brace up for more grief because no one is prepared to lend them a voice. They must be ready for more deadly journeys through borders strewn with murderous border police or alternative routes littered with mines. They must be ready to be greeted by hostile hosts in target destinations in Bangladesh, who are prepared to house them in the most unstable parts where no human should be put, or in India, where they face certain deportation back into the hands of their tormentors and certain death.

After all it’s a cruel world, where different rules are applied for different peoples and situations. Otherwise, we should be readying to restrain the Myanmar regime as was done in the case of Libya, where the excesses were nowhere near as grave as they are in Myanmar.