US Bandwagon gets further exposed on Myanmar alignment amidst Rohingya genocide
[TamilNet, Saturday, 13 May 2017, 23:22 GMT]The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Ms Yanghee Lee,
announced in the UNHRC at Geneva on 13 March that the Burmese state was
involved in Crimes against Humanity directed towards the Rohingya
people. The rapporteur has further said that the institutional
persecution “indicates the government may be trying to expel the
Rohingya population from the country altogether” and she demanded an
international level probe. Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Sung Kyi,
who is the de facto leader of Myanmar government has refuted the UN
report, and announced that an internal investigation is suffice to look
into allegations. The USA, the EU and the UK have avoided taking a stand
on the investigations and are apparently backing Myanmar to evade
international pressure due to their geopolitical interests.
The UK’s envoy to the UNHRC, Julian Braithwaite, said that the
international community needed to engage with the Myanmar State “without
damaging the delicate civilian-military balance”.
The British response is somewhat similar to the British role played in the case of Eezham Tamils.
On
05 February 2009, when the war was heading towards genocidal end in
Vanni, Sir John Sawer, the representative of the UK to the UN Security
Council (who later became the chief of MI6, Britain's external
intelligence agency), went on record stating that the Tamil Tigers were
long blighting the government of Sri Lanka. “We want these to be brought
to an end,” John Sawer said at that time.
In Myanmar, the
US-bandwagon is continuously pursuing its agenda of strengthening
economic, military and geo-political ties with the ‘reformed’ Burmese
State.
Many western diplomats, stating that she is constrained
by the remnants of the military junta, and its hold over the civilian
administration, defend Aung San Sung Kyi stand.
Such excuses
reminds Eezham Tamils of the western rhetoric of how ‘liberal’ Sinhala
politicians in Colombo are being constrained by the Sinhala Buddhist
extremists, commented Tamil activists in Jaffna.
Reports on the
recent phase of systematic persecution of the Rohingya emerged during
2012, when Burmese military and police and Bamar and Arakanese mobs
alongside the Buddhist monks were behind the ethnic cleansing of
Rohingya inhabited settlements throughout Arakan state and in the
central littoral parts of the country.
[Map courtesy:cfr.org ]
The systematically
intensifying violence against the Rohingya of Burma triggered an exodus
of refugees numbering over 65,000 according to the UN estimate, to
neighbouring countries. More than one third of them have fled since
October 2016, following the recent military and security forces’
operations conducted by the Burmese government in Rakhine state
systematically targeting Rohingya villages and settlements.
The
recent upsurge in government violence is characterised by
counter-insurgency strategies and follows what the government says is
Rohingya militant attacks on border-patrols along the Rakhine and
Bangaldeshi border.
Aung San Sung Kyi, defends Burmese military
operations against Rohingya villages stating it was triggered by
militant attacks, and decries international criticism against the
Burmese government and military.
Yet the fleeing Rohingyas are
not desired even among neighbours, such experiences of genocide and
abandonment is well understood by the Eezham Tamil nation as well.
In
Bangladesh to which a majority of Rohnigya have fled due to its
cultural and geographical proximity, they are hoarded into internment
camps.
Wherever the Rohingya have set up their make-shift camps,
Bangladeshi authorities have responded by demolishing them, and
deploying increasing coast and border guarding operations to prevent the
further arrival of Rohingya refugees fleeing genocidal violence. There
have also been several incidents of refugees being sent back.
On
11 January, Bangladeshi Prime minister Sheikh Hasina is reported to
have officially requested the government of Burma to take back tens of
thousands of Rohingya refugees.
In December 2016, according to
Mizzima News, the foreign minister of Bangladesh in communique with
Burmese officials expressed that his government wishes to deport over
300 000 Rohingya from Bangladesh, who he allege have been there
illegally for years.
The Rohingya people has had a historical
presence in the region, yet the Burmese State and Buddhist Burmese
nationalists refute this as well as the national character of the
Rohhingya by denying them both citizen rights and recognition as an
ethnicity indigenous to the land. Subsequently they are denied what is
their entitlement to exercise collective political rights and
self-determination in their historic territory of habitation.
The
Rohingya are framed and subsequently delegitimized as Bangladeshis and
immigrants, and posited as external to the country. Similarly such a
discourse reflects the Bamar chauvinist nature of Burmese nationalism,
which was evident also with the post-independence ‘Bumiputra’ movements
of the Buddhist chauvinists who forcefully uprooted hundred thousands of
Tamils in Burma in the 1950s by framing them as illegal immigrants and
as implanted by the British from India. The efforts coordinated by the
Burmese state to ensure such an exodus utterly denied the historic
presence of maritime and mercantile Tamil communities in Burma in
historical past.
The modern Burmese State is constituted by a
coalition of Buddhist ethnic groups, but is dominated by the Bamar, and
has ever since its independence been fashioned in the image of a
Theravada Buddhist military State.
The intricate connection
between the modern state with Theravada Buddhism and nationalism is
comparative to the development of the Sinhala Buddhist character of the
imperialist implanted unitary state of Ceylon, which later renamed
itself to Sri Lanka.
What is equally striking is the
geo-political matrix within which Burma and the Rohingya question is
embroiled, and reflects the designs and modus operandi of powers in the
Indian Ocean region and in South Asia.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was
awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace prize and whom the USA has promoted as a
champion of democracy and freedom and her party the National League for
Democracy (NLD) have since their electoral victory in November 2015,
been an integral component of the new government. The USA and its allies
have been normalizing State-to-State relations and are cultivating new
ties with the new government.
The US rapprochement and
normalization of diplomatic ties with Burma has hastened throughout 2016
and was given a decisive shove with the November 2015 election of Aung
Sui Kyi and her party into a coalition government with political
representatives of the military junta. The strategic interests on part
of the US Establishment are also evident in the recent lifting of long
standing sanctions against the Burmese state by the Obama
administration.
However, the US engagement is not based on
humanitarian orientations as evident in the US trajectory of
intervention in the region. It is rather of imperialist, corporate and
of strategic geo-political and geo-economics interests. Burma’s
strategic position between South Asia and South–East Asia is well known
and there is a Western component in countering Chinese influence in the
region and tilting the Burmese state towards the US bandwagon through
offering a free market economy.
The territories wherein the
Rohingyas are settled also roughly correspond with the Isthmus of Kra, a
perennially strategic point in controlling trade and movement across
the Bay of Bengal and the South-China Sea.
Strategic location of the Isthmus of Kra and the Rohingya territory
The Rohingya territory is
also eyed by imperialist interests for its canal potentialities in a
similar fashion as occurred in Mesoamerica where the Isthmus of Panama
after initial French attempts was brought under the possession of the
USA and subsequently the Panama Canal was built and controlled by the
USA from the early years of the 20th century till date.
A
dimension to the re-alignment strategies of the USA towards the Burmese
State is to secure geo-political and economic interests, without
contradicting the Burmese ruling elites and government established
patterns of national oppression and structural genocide against
non-Buddhist nations and people.
Such patterns of oppression and
land dispossession can also be argued serve MNCs and US aligned
geo-economic interests opting to secure free economic zones, trade and
manufacturing benefits, and preferential access to natural and human
resources and strategic territories in order to secure a process of
exploitative extraction.
The US efforts in approaching Burma
have hence tilted the Burmese State towards free market economy and US
orientation, liberal ideology, liberalisation of media etc. but this has
not implied any re-configuration of State power or any democratic
facilitation of the inalienable rights of oppressed nation, and peoples
in Burma. It has rather lead to the resoluteness of the ruling elites of
Burma in finding military solutions or other enforced solutions to the
national questions rampant in several parts of Burma.
It was
evident when the Burmese state broke a 17-year cease-fire agreement with
the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in 2012 and began an extensive
military campaign to destroy the movement and occupy the Kachin
territory. There were reports of this being coordinated with foreign
investment projects aimed at exploitation of natural resources. Mainly
it was reported to be Chinese and MNC interests in utilizing
hydro-electric potentialities in the Irrawaddy delta region.
Rohingya
activists have pointed out that the recent military campaigns aimed at
ethnically cleansing territories for Rohingya settlements are similarly
aligned with the interests of pursuing a military solution to the
Rohingya question as well as to clear the land for corporate
exploitation of natural resources.
It is in the backdrop of such
international dynamics that the State apparatuses of the Burmese state
have systematically escalated their persecution and atrocities against
the Rohingya people. There are important lessons to take from this, as
international endorsement of and interaction with an oppressive or
genocidal State serves only to embolden the State and its political
elites.
Furthermore, Aung Sui Kyi and the Burmese government deny
any allegation of genocide and atrocities against the Rohingya and
brand such allegations as propaganda. This is reminiscent of the modus
operandi of genocidal State of Sri Lanka talking of ‘development’ with
its global actors in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils.
The
Burmese governmental legitimization of the coordinated set of actions
aiming to debase, de-territorialize, and annihilate the national
existence of the Rohingya also bears similarities with Colombo defending
its genocidal war in 2009 by cloaking its genocidal nature and intent
with narratives of it being the ‘greatest humanitarian rescue mission’
and as a ‘war against terrorism’.
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