2017 - The Year of The Rohingya: The Victims Of Own Central Government And "National" Army
01 January 2018By Amir Taheri
Medieval historians in the Middle East often used the memory of particularly
great disasters as a label for a year or even a whole epoch under study. The
original model came from pre-Islamic Arabia with such well known examples as
"The Year of the Elephant" remembering the year in which the Abyssinians
invaded the Tihama, or the Year of the Locust in which swarms of famished
insects wiped out crops across a vast arc spanning from the Peninsula to the
Mediterranean.
Last year we used the formula by designating 2016 as The Year of Aleppo to
mark the destruction through carpet-bombing of a great Islamic city by the
Russian Air Force, pushing the Syrian tragedy further down the abyss of
inhumanity.
At the time we couldn't imagine that 2017 will witness an even greater crime
against humanity in the shape of what the UN Secretary General Antonio
Guterres has dubbed "the genocide" of the Rohingya people in Burma (Myanmar).
Aleppo was crucified by a foreign power using its superior military force
against a defenseless population pushed to the edge of collective nervous
breakdown by years of starvation and conflict.
In the case of the Rohingya, however, the genocide was organized and carried
out by what was, in theory at least, the victims' own central government and
"national" army. Worse still the government in question was, again in theory
at least, headed by a woman who had been cast as an angel of compassion and
crowned with a Nobel Prize for Peace.
That Russia might use massive force to crush real or imagined foes would cause
little surprise for those familiar with history. It was not so long ago that
the Russian air force reduced Chechnya to a pile of rubble, killed a quarter
of the population and drove another quarter out of their homes.
Burma, however, was supposed to be a peaceful neck of the wood where Buddhism,
supposed to be a school of peace and harmony reigned supreme.
In 1977 I interviewed the Burmese "strongman" General Ne Win who harped at
length about how Buddha's teachings could save the world from violence and
war.
The fact that he himself had seized power through a putsch seemed an exception
against a broader history in which Burma, an ex-British colony, appeared to be
immune from the kind of violence the world had witnessed in the Indo-Pakistani
subcontinent and neighboring Indo-China.
To students of post-colonial developments, Burma had the potential to become a
model of peaceful development.
Under Prime Minister Thakin Nu, better known as U Nu, Burma had achieved a
special status in the non-aligned movement. U Nu himself was ranked along
India's Nehru and Indonesia Sukarno as the three "sages" of the so-called
Third World. Thus, when U Nu proposed one of his ministers, U Thant, as
Secretary General of the United Nations, everyone applauded. In the chilliest
years of the Cold War U Thant managed to lead the UN for 10 years, a record at
his time.
I interviewed U Thant in Tehran in 1968 when he chaired an international
conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human
Fights. His aim was to broaden the scope of the original declaration to
include a whole set of new social and economic rights.
The result was the famous Tehran Declaration, a fruit of U Thant's patient
diplomacy and goodwill, which remains the pinnacle of "progressive"
aspirations.
So, how could the country of U Nu and U Thant, a land which has the highest
ratio of priests to the total population, become the venue for the largest
genocide the world has seen since Rwanda in the last century? Worse still, how
could the Buddhist clergy become cheer-leaders and, in many cases, even active
accomplices of the military units specially trained to kill civilians and raze
villages to the ground?
The first lesson to draw from the genocide of the Rohingya is that one should
not exclude the possibility of evil in human affairs as mere figment of
metaphysical imagination.
As the Persian poet Nasser Khosrow observed almost 1000 years ago, since we
see the effect of evil, if we wish to combat it, we had better assume its
existence. Evil could assume many identities.
It could wear the mask of a spiritual sage like U Nu or a compassionate
peacemaker like U Thant not to mention the soldier of "Buddhist Socialism" Ne
Win or the darling of Western bleeding-heart liberals Aung Sang Suu Ky.
To justify the genocide, Myanmar propaganda has accused the Rohingya of many
misdeeds most notably that of having fought Japanese invaders of Burma during
the Second World War. They are also blamed for keeping their own language, one
of 22 languages native to Burma, alive. But the Rohingya's supreme crime is
that a majority of them are Muslims.
And, yet, the Rohingya have received little more than lip service from the 57
Muslim-majority nations. None has deemed it necessary to sever ties with
Myanmar. A handful have sent token aid to Rohingya refugees dying of
starvation and disease in neighboring Bangladesh.
The Islamic Republic in Iran was even less attentive to the Rohingya tragedy.
A cargo of humanitarian aid, perhaps costing a few hundred thousand dollars,
much less than Hassan Nasrallah's monthly stipend from Tehran, was sent to
Bangladesh that hosts half a million Rohingyas forced out of Burma.
No regime big shot, and not even one of the thousands of mullahs getting fat
on government salary, was sent to shed crocodile tears and wave the flag. As
for Erdogan, for "Supreme Guide" AIi Khamenei, it was Jerusalem or bust.
The so-called international community did not better. The UN Security Council
and General Assembly could come up with emergency sessions to condemn Trump's
Jerusalem move; something that has no effect on the reality on the ground, but
were reluctant to put the Rohingya genocide on the agenda.
The Security Council could promulgate unanimous sanctions against North
Korea's "little rocket-man" but dragged its silk-stockinged feet when it came
to deciding meaningful action on the Rohingya.
Yes, 2017 was the Year of the Rohingya and a year of shame for the so-called
international community.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran
from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications,
published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since
1987
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