Why Don’t More People Know About the Atrocities in Myanmar?

Myanmar (also known as Burma) is a Southeast Asian nation that borders Bangladesh, Laos, Thailand, China and India. This February, the Burmese military junta staged a coup and nullified election results from November 2020, in which the civilian political party National League for Democracy, won 83% of the seats in parliament. Since then, the military has brutally suppressed peaceful protests, arresting hundreds of people (including politicians and civil society activists) and killing over 700 people, including children. Last Friday, the military butchered over 80 protestors near Yangon. Thousands of others have disappeared.

To say that the country is spiraling into civil war is an understatement. By most accounts, it’s already a failed state. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Since March, the Biden administration (as well as the European Union) has levied two rounds of sanctions against Burma, and the crisis has proved to be a rare bipartisan issue for American leaders. President Joe Biden consulted with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about the crisis. Referring to Biden officials, McConnell told Politico, “Their instincts are good,” but added,

“Our ability to influence this from halfway around the world is limited.”

McConnell’s right. But you know who does have tremendous influence in Burma? Russia and China, whom the E.U. has accused of helping to perpetuate the bloodshed by blocking arms embargoes from the United Nations Security Council. The Trump administration tried to counter Chinese influence in Burma while being careful not to interfere with the fragile democratic progress slowly taking hold.

Before the February 2021 coup, the situation in Burma was extremely delicate, as democracy was slowly unfurling in the country. Burma gained independence from the British in 1948, but the army seized power in 1962 and changed the state’s name to Myanmar (the United States still uses “Burma”). By 2011, civilian rule was slowly taking hold again and optimism was high.

But shortly thereafter, Myanmar took on a campaign against an ethnic minority of which most Americans have never heard: the Rohingya. Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country of 54 million people, has been accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority whom Burma doesn’t even recognize as citizens, even excluding them from the 2014 census. At least 25,000 Rohingya have been killed in a conflict that began in 2012, when a group of Rohingya men were accused of raping and murdering a Buddhist woman, and Buddhist nationalists responded by burning Rohingya homes and killing and raping many people. The military, non-Muslim locals (especially fanaticized Buddhist monks) and police forces in the country’s northwestern Rakhine State (where most Rohingya lived) carried out the bulk of atrocities. One report by the Ontario International Development Agency in Canada revealed that 18,000 women and girls had been raped by the army and the police and that 34,000 Rohingya had been thrown into fires.

The mother (center) of Aung Kaung Htet wails while mourning during a funeral for Aung, 15, who was killed when military junta forces opened fire on anti-coup protesters, on March 21, 2021 in Yangon, Myanmar. (Photo by Stringer/Getty Images)

Before the violence really escalated in 2017, there were 1.4 million Rohingya in Burma. Over 740,000 of them have fled to Bangladesh, creating a tragic refugee crisis. The military offensive that Burma has unleashed against the Rohingya has been a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” (according to Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a U.N. human rights official). U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called the Rohingya “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world.” The U.N. as well as various human rights groups have officially applied the term “genocide” to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.

Officials from both the Biden and Trump administrations have also condemned Myanmar for its atrocities. But what has truly been amazing is the utter silence of Muslim countries around the world, some of which, like Iran, continue to obsessively demonize Israel, falsely claiming that the Jewish Israelis are ethnically cleansing Muslim Palestinians. Meanwhile, in Myanmar, Buddhists are being accused committing genocide against the Rohingya, the majority of whom are Muslim. What utter hypocrisy on the part of the Muslim world. Why would official Muslim states such as Iran express so much outrage over purported Jewish treatment of Muslims but not lift a finger over actual Buddhist genocide of Muslims? The double standard points to egregious anti-Semitism (which Iran cloaks as anti-Zionism). Of course, the most urgent task is to save the Rohingya, but Muslim countries also are missing a critical opportunity to speak with a rare unified voice against Burmese atrocities.

What has truly been amazing is the utter silence of Muslim countries around the world.

But Muslim countries are not the only ones silent on this issue. Why haven’t we seen major protests outside the Burmese embassy in Washington, D.C. or the consulate in Los Angeles? Because most Americans can’t identify Burma on a map, few know about the treatment of the Rohingya and, more recently, many don’t know that the military junta has butchered and arrested countless people. Ironically, the Myanmar consulate is located in a space called Equitable Plaza on Wilshire Boulevard.

There’s also another overlooked component of the Burmese situation: The world hasn’t held the country’s former de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, accountable for the suffering of the Rohingya, most likely because she used to be a human rights icon. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for peacefully resisting the former military dictatorship that imprisoned her for fifteen years. In November 2020, she won a landslide election, but her government was toppled by the military junta a few months ago, and she’s since been arrested again. Kyi should nevertheless be held accountable for a genocide that began while she was still in power, but she’s even denied genocide allegations. Despite knowing of the atrocities the Burmese government was committing against the Rohingya, she spoke at the Hague in 2019 and described the brutality as “intercommunal violence.”

Burma is part of the International Criminal Court (ICC), but a group of former lawmakers (who were helping to shape the new civilian government) is probing the ICC to investigate crimes against humanity as a result of the February coup.

A military coup, murdered protestors, ousted democratic lawmakers and actual ethnic cleaning: these are some of Burma’s human rights abuses, and yet, the ICC remains impotent regarding this crisis. Can you imagine if Israel, a thriving and compassionate democracy, were to engage in even one of these human rights violations?

As things stand, the ICC recently announced that it will probe Israel for possible war crimes. Twenty-five thousand Rohingya have been butchered by Buddhist Burmese and the ICC is investigating Israel? I actually can’t make this stuff up. And that’s to say nothing of the ICC’s utter failure to do anything about the deadly conflict in Syria, which, since 2011, has killed nearly 400,000 people (and created one of the world’s largest refugee crises).

I’m waiting for the day when the plight of the Rohingya appears on the front page of every major American newspaper and is championed by every leader in the Muslim word. As Hannah Arendt said, “Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”


Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist. Follow her on Twitter @RefaelTabby

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