Editorial: Plight of Myanmar refugees demands attention
The plight of the Rohingya Muslims is ethnic cleansing.
The wrenching plight of more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh deserves our attention. Graphic photographs and video show the devastating toll of their sudden, violent and painful exodus at the hands of Myanmar's military.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson correctly labeled the military's atrocities in Myanmar "ethnic cleansing," as has the United Nations. Some, including Maung Zarni, a Buddhist native of Myanmar, genocide scholar and human rights activist, have criticized the U.S. for not calling the gang rape, torture, murder and torching of homes and villages genocide.
Others were more sanguine.
"Secretary Tillerson's acknowledgement of ethnic cleansing and call for an investigation sets an example for how the world can respond to this crisis," said Joanne Lin, national director of advocacy and government relations for Amnesty International USA, in an interview with Foreign Policy. "The time for outrage and condemnation has passed."
Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is a largely Buddhist nation. Political and military friction have demonized the Rohingya, who are mostly Sunni Muslim, as dangerous Islamist extremists because of a perceived link to al-Qaida.
One of the reasons the U.S. has been slow to respond is that Aung San Suu Ky, Myanmar's de facto leader and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has denied that ethnic cleansing is taking place. Her advisers say atrocities have not occurred.
About two-thirds of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have fled since August. At least 354 villages were burned, and thousands of Muslims were killed.
But it is the rape that stuns even seasoned doctors and aid workers.
Doctors Without Borders have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, one-third of them under 18. The youngest was 9, The Associated Press reported.
Riada Asimovic Akyol, a writer on gender, nationalism and religion, recently described similarities between what is happening to the Rohingya women and what happened in her country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during a 1990s war during which more than 20,000 women were brutalized sexually.
"In the case of the Rohingya I worry especially for the future of the women who have suffered these mass rapes: They might be in the news for now, but as in Bosnia, could later end up marginalized, silenced and abandoned to their traumas, even by some members of their own community," she wrote in The New York Times.
Today, thousands of refugees in sprawling camps are waiting, as the Times reported, "for their fates to be decided by countries that want nothing more than to be rid of them."
"The key test of any democracy," Tillerson said, "is how it treats its most vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as the ethnic Rohingya."
We wonder what might come next for the Rohingya, and for the military leaders who are engaged in ethnic cleansing and serial rape. We wonder, too, if those responsible for the atrocities will ever be brought to justice, as Gen. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, was when he was convicted in November of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison. And we wonder if the new year will bring something like peace and comfort to the Rohingya Muslims, abandoned and adrift in Bangladesh.