One Lesson from Srebrenica
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 13 Jul 2015
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Maung Zarni
12 Jul 2015 – World is busy commemorating yet another anniversary of a genocide.
Indifference, business-as-usual, denial, and complicity are hallmarks of international stance towards any genocide, past and present, over the last 100 years.
Rohingyas don’t really have much prospect of survival as an ethnic group in the face of the determined genocidal groups, both Myanmar regime and the Rakhine Nazis.
Alas, no lessons from past denials, indifference, legal hair splitting, etc, have been incorporated into today’s policy discussions about Myanmar’s slow genocide of the Rohingyas.
“The parallel to Nazi genocide” – as Soros drew about the plight of Rohingya in Myanmar based on his first hand experience of a Jew in Budapest in 1944 – is not the only one. The international responses to the genocide of the Rohingya are another set of parallel.
Bill Clinton invited a well-known woman Rwandan human rights activist to the White House for tea, but didn’t think of prioritizing the need to intervene in her country’s imminent genocide after the cups were taken away and washed up.
Barack Obama brought in a well-known woman Rohingya activist Wai Wai Nu to the White House religious dinner for Muslims. (Hopefully – but unlikely – Obama has formed a national security team to take the lead to stop the slow genocide that her people have been subjected to since 1978).
I for one don’t expect any government to concede that a genocide (s) is unfolding while they are carrying out business-as-usual.
According to the now US Representative to the UN, Samantha Power who won the Pulitzer for non-fiction with her “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocides,” (a scathing indictment of US Foreign Policy Establishment) the then US Secretary of State Warren Christopher permitted US State Department officials to use the word ‘genocide’ – only 2 weeks after facts on the ground from Rwanda surfaced: close to 900,000 Tutsi Rwandans were genocided. (Until then the US State Department’s directive to all US officials is ‘say that ‘acts of genocide’ may have been committed, according to Prof. Greg Stanton, a leading scholar on genocide and one of the founders of Yale’s Genocide Studies Seminar. He wrote a memo on what constitutes a genocide at the request of State Department).
35 years on, the hybrid UN-Cambodia tribunal – known as Khmer Rouge Tribunal – has NOT used the word ‘genocide’ – after 1.8 million dead, and the whole world has pretty much accepted that Khmer Rouge committed a series of genocide – Buddhist monks (as a religious group), Cham Muslims, Chinese Khmer and Vietnamese. In fact, USA and UK (specifically, the administration of Mr Human Rights Jimmy Carter kept Pol Pot regime’s as ‘the legitimate representative’ of Khmer people at the United Nations, and of course, so did Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, with the full knowledge that the anti-Vietnam (and therefore anti-USSR) Khmer Rouge was genocidal in deeds and character. On its part, Deng’s Communist China pumped up to $10 billion in total in support of Pol Pot’s murderous regime. Thailand provided Khmer Rouge troops safe haven along Thai-Cambodia borders as the latter regrouped to re-take the country from the now Vietnam-occupied Phnom Penh, the mission Pol Pot regime never accomplished.
Rewind 100 years back to the Young Turks’ Turkey which scapegoated Christian Armenians and went on to commit a genocide against the latter – over 1 million of them – just on the eve of the First World War and before the term genocide was coined (in the 1940’s). Britain, then the global power in today’s parlance, and other European powers were indifferent to the plight of the Armenians. Only the American Ambassador Hans Mogenthau – then in Turkey – was showing any outrage and worry about the systematic persecution of the Armenians.
Again the British government reportedly KNEW what was happening at Auschwitz as early as 1944, and let nearly 1 million Jews and other Nazi victims slaughtered as it was busy trying to defeat Hitler.
Indifference, business-as-usual, denial, and complicity are hallmarks of international stance towards any genocide, past and present.
Rohingyas don’t really have much prospect of survival as an ethnic group in the face of the determined genocidal groups, both Myanmar regime and the Rakhine Nazis.
One major lesson from Srebrenica is that there is no lesson learned or incorporated into today’s responses to Myanmar’s genocide.
When it comes to my country’s unfolding genocide careerist Human Rights crowds and Humanitarian Industry obfuscate and complexify the genocidal reality. Ah, it’s all about ‘statelessness’ ‘citizenship’ irregular movement at sea’ ‘humanitarian crisis’ ‘discrimination’ ‘persecution’, ‘under-development’ ‘democratic transition’, and the list goes on.
The world of power and influence is in the final instance a world of shameful deeds, dishonest policies and business-as-usual inhumanity.
Sad, unconscionable and outrageous – but painfully true.
80, 800, 8,000, 80,000, 800,000 or 8,000,000, genocide is NOT about the size of the victims murdered and/or otherwise destroyed.
In Rwandan, it was estimated that 800,000-900,000 Tutsi Rwandan were slaughtered because they were Tutsi or identified as Tutsi.
In Bosnia, the number is much smaller: 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, most were boys and men – were murdered on the basis of their identity.
In Myanmar, the number of Rohingyas – or “Bengali” in the genocidal language of the regimes and the “Buddhist” society – who have been executed or murdered may not reach the level of Srebrenica – much less Rwanda.
However, the number of murdered members of the group, ethnic, racial, religious or national, is not the issue. The issue really is and what concerns the genocide law, as well as the idea, is this:
Tutsis, Bosnian Muslim and Rohingyas have been murdered because of their ethnic, national and religious identities.
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Dr. Maung Zarni, Associate Fellow, the University of Malaya, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website http://www.maungzarni.net.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 13 Jul 2015.
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