Beyond Palestine, International Law and White Supremacy: A Personal Reflection
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 16 Sep 2024
Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service
Al Aqsa Masjid (Dome of the Rock), Jerusalem, Palestine.
Photo: Muhamad Taufiq Bin Azmi, Shutterstock
Even if the issue is organically tied to you, if you offer a perspective that challenges the White Supremacist World’s prevailing analyses and views, you would very likely find yourself swimming against the currents.
12 Sep 2024 – This interview of mine on my 9-days in Palestine was conducted by Ousman Noor, co-director of The Civilian Agenda.
Brother OUSMAN did a brilliant job of editing it down to 22 minutes from a very lengthy conversation we had. Thanks to him, it has made some educational impact in terms of understanding genocides as established processes or “ecosystems of methods of destruction of targeted population (s), under occupation”. It has reached nearly one million accounts on Twitter on Ousman’s twitter alone.
Zarni and Ousman Noor, Amman, Jordan, 6 September 2024
In this I strove to go beyond the deeply impoverished legal definition of genocide, which left out the spirit, richness and depth of Raphael Lemkin’s genius conception of genocide, the (intentional) destruction of “nations/populations under occupation”, in whole or in substantial part.
As a young law student at the university in the then Polish city of Lwow (now Lviv in Ukraine, thanks to Stalin snatching a piece of land into the then USSR post-WWII), Raphael Lemkin developed his ideas about population destruction as a crime at least a decade before the Nazi-genocide began. He was obsessed with the destruction of identity-based populations, all throughout different historical eras, from the Mongolian invasion of Krakow (where he briefly studied) to the Christian convert-persecution in Nagasaki region by the Samurai to the Armenian genocide.
A memorial plaque on the building where Raphael Lemkin, “father of the term genocide”, lived as a student in the then Polish city in the 1920’s. FORSEA Co-founder and author paying homage to this great legal mind. Photo: Maung Zarni
My reason for breaking with the established wisdom on the predominantly juridical approach to genocide as a legal crime (since 1948) is twofold: first, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is un-enforceable. For the United Nations’s judicial organs – namely the principal or original International Court of Justice (ICJ) (for member states) and the additional court The International Criminal Court (ICC) – lack any law enforcing mechanisms; and second, the learned debates on what constitutes genocide is stupidly fixated by the question of “single intent” while the essence of genocide is reduced to 5- disconnected clusters of “acts”.
Here is The Civilian Agenda’s original Twitter post: https://x.com/ousmannoor/status/1832506169715212540?t=Md5dBxllw-HdENkSJklx6Q&s=19 There have also been cross-postings on multiple social platforms, including Instagram, Thread, YouTube etc.
Some of the big influencers on Palestine including Lowkey, a renowned British musician, helped spread the interview while the brave UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories of Palestine Francesca Albanese has urged her followers, “MUST WATCH”. Here is Francesca Albanese’s post: https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/1832733158904648064?t=oTX6Vr9FE2bSlYgUeaBqJw&s=19
Beyond “ego” or “being pleased with myself”, and making a small contribution to the Palestinian liberation struggle – which began decades before I was born, and which continues to be resolute and strong – I am pleased with my interview’s global cyberspace reception for a simple reason: it broke the invisible barrier of the enveloping ideology of “White Supremacy” when it comes to individuals from formerly colonized world (or so-called Global South), “speaking out of turn.”
For the last 36 years during which I began my educational and professional career in the US and subsequently in the UK, I have confronted with this pervasive view: that a Burmese scholar or activist or, in my case, scholar-activist (a scholar pursuing what Marx called “praxis”, applying one’s knowledge to improve human conditions) is deemed qualified – and commonly expected – to speak only on the Burma issues to which he or she is “biologically” or “personally tied”.
Even if the issue is organically tied to you, if you offer a perspective that challenges the White Supremacist World’s prevailing analyses and views, you would very likely find yourself swimming against the currents. That is something my dear Palestinian friend Nada Tarbush’s late father Mohammmad Tarbush DPhi, (Oxon/Oxford) recorded with palpable frustrations and pain in his posthumously published memoir, My Palestine: An Impossible Exile, The more things change, the more they stay the same (Hause, 2024).
The minute I open my mouth, or pen an article, on any non-Burma issues, the White Supremacy World of think tanks, universities, governments, mass media outlets etc – all those ideological apparatuses – react with characteristic incredulity (disbelief).
The trolls I have over the years received whenever I speak publicly on, say, American Fascism, British feudalism etc. are typically in the vein of “Stick with Burma”, a variation of “Go back to where you came from” or “what country are you really from?”.
Never mind that this ideological, cultural, societal and institutional White Supremacist world – of power, money, prestige, standing and worldwide influence – has produced literally thousands of white-skinned experts on virtually any subject, including Burma or Myanmar Studies, that can be studied under the sun.
That is why, I made a very self-conscious – and income-wise risky – decision not to be employed by or associated with any Western (imperialist) Ivory Tower, when I returned from Malaysia in 2014 where my family and I were living in a safehouse, under the government’s protection. (As a lone voice crying “genocide” when I realized my own Buddhist country was perpetrating a textbook genocide, in the disguise first of “communal violence” and subsequently of “ant-terrorism” operations, I was a target of death threats and vilification by both the Burmese state and society.
After some serious consideration, I politely declined the offer of a fellowship from the London School of Economics. And I succeeded in killing, once and for all, my slave-like temptation to even mention Oxford or Harvard as institutions which I was formerly affiliated.
As a Fanon-ite, I am pleased to fight this lifelong personal war against all forms of manifestations of White Supremacist Colonialism, which is alive and kicking. Palestine is but one of the living examples where pervasive White Supremacist racism operates via American-Israeli joint genocide, also aided by former serial genocide offenders (including Canada, Australia and above all Germany).
Against my own immediate professional interests, I reclaim my agency to decide what I wish to specialise in, as opposed to what tiny shithole in which I am expected to function, in this immoral, conscienceless world run by White Supremacists of all shades and forms.
The oppressed and the subjugated have no choice but to fight on multiple fronts, concurrently and in their daily life, not only for their political liberation but also for their own intrinsic worth, dignity and intellectual independence.
The late Edward Said’s grounded scholarship had left a paradigm-shifting intellectual-ideological legacy that has inspired so many of us in liberation struggles to look beyond our immediate concerns, such as our countries of origin.
The late Edward Said, a friend of Mohamammad Tarbush, would agree.
Some 30 years ago as a youngish student at my alma mater at the University of Wisconsin -Madison, I heard Edward Said, the late renowned Palestinian thinker and revolutionary deliver his public lecture which shredded Samuel Huntington’s bogus “clash of civilization” thesis. At the same event, and to my deep disgust, I also watched a group of Zionist American students heckling Professor Said, calling the latter “a terrorist” during the Q and A.
Alas, all colonizing cultures, mindsets, systems and verbal articulations are typically and inherently Orwellian: the commonly parasitic settler colonialist European offshoots – most specifically the United States – billed themselves as “the (biblical) City upon the Hill,” just as all European colonizers framed their wholesale loot, plunder, mass murder, and rape of the “peoples without history” as “Civilizing Mission”.
Or contemporaneously, we are often tortured by the White Supremacist media’s Goebbels-esque mantra of “Israel is the only democracy” in the Middle East.
My own historian teacher at Madison, the late Robert L. Koehl, rightly observed how clever the Nazis were in that they resorted to all types of euphemisms to refer to their darkest of crimes – “protective custody” (ghettoization of the Jews), “natural causes” (the Final Solution’s articulation of mass-murder of inmates via diseases, as a matter of design), “liquidation” (mass extermination), etc.
Let me repeat my long-standing observation: White Supremacist Colonialisms and the Nazi Genocidal Racism differ only in degree, not in kind. They both seek to subjugate, denigrate, dismiss, colonize and variously destroy you, your self-worth, and your lot.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.
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