Who will help Myanmar’s Rohingya?” was the BBC’s plaintive question on Monday. As awareness is heightening of the appalling brutality being inflicted on a community once called the world’s most friendless people – the mass displacements, killings, rapes, destruction of homes and property – it appears that some champions are at last ready to come forward.
On Sunday, Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Tun Razak took to the stage at a rally in the country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, and he did not mince his words. “The world cannot sit by and watch genocide taking place,” he said. “The world cannot just say ‘look, it is not our problem’. It is our problem.”
His very public intervention was highly unusual, as member states of Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) are bound by the principle of non-interference in each others’ internal affairs. The Myanmar government had cited this openly when telling Mr Najib not to attend the rally, which was also supported by leaders of the opposition Islamic party PAS.
“They warned me,” Mr Najib told the cheering crowd of thousands. “But I don’t care.” Questioning what the de facto Myanmar leader’s possession of a Nobel Peace Prize meant, given her unwillingness to confront the problems facing the Rohingya, Mr Najib said: “I want to tell Aung San Suu Kyi: enough is enough.”
Some critics have suggested that such defiance of diplomatic protocol was a vote-winning ploy by Mr Najib, whom many expect to call a general election next year. But his concern over Muslim issues has been evident since he took office in 2009.
In any case, he was not alone. Also on Sunday, the secretary general of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Dr Yousef Al Othaimeen, called upon member states “to raise the plight of the Rohingya with the Myanmar government at every opportunity and to remain ‘seized’ by the issue”. He emphasised that it is a charter obligation of OIC member states to “safeguard the rights, dignity and religious and cultural identity of Muslim communities and minorities in non-member-states”.
Then on Monday, Din Syamsuddin, a former chairman of the 30-million-strong Indonesian Islamic group Muhammadiyah, weighed in. “We condemn the killings,” he said. “For the sake of Asean stability and solidarity, the oppression being committed on the Rohingyas must be stopped.” He wants both Asean and the OIC to act.
Underlining the gravity of the crisis, a new report by the respected British medical journal The Lancet concluded that the language used to describe it is no hyperbole.
“The part played by the Myanmar government in restricting Rohingya reproductive rights, and in the high morbidity and mortality of the Rohingya people, could arguably be advanced as a charge of genocide, or at the very least as ethnic cleansing,” it said.
The Myanmar government has hit back, labelling Mr Najib’s comments “not true” and promising an official response. But the country’s leaders appear to be in denial over the fate of a people whose circumstances have long been precarious – a 1982 law excluded them from a list of 135 recognised national races and deprived them of citizenship – and are now catastrophic.
Approximately 140,000 of the around one million Rohingya have been in camps since riots in 2012 saw them lose their homes. Many thousands have fled during the latest violence, which has escalated to the point that the UN human rights agency said recently “the pattern of violations against the Rohingya may amount to crimes against humanity”.
What has been happening recently in Rakhine state in western Myanmar, it has been suggested, could be South East Asia’s equivalent of Srebrenica – the massacre of 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, when the town was supposed to be a “safe area” under UN protection. The former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan declared it to have been the worst crime committed on European soil since the Second World War.
As it happens, Mr Annan is currently on a mission to Myanmar tasked with finding a “lasting solution to the complex and delicate issues in the Rakhine state”. That rather euphemistic description, along with the fact that Mr Annan’s team is to report within 12 months, implies a lack of urgency on the part of the Myanmar authorities in dealing with a situation for which they themselves are almost completely responsible.
A lasting solution may indeed be complex, not least due to the anti-Muslim sentiments whipped up in Buddhist majority Myanmar and to the marginalisation of an ethnic group that has gone on for so long that it has been normalised in the country they have always called home.
But genocide or ethnic cleansing are certainly not “complex and delicate issues”. Stronger words, open condemnation and swift action are needed to avert their continuance. Mr Najib was right to stick his head above the diplomatic parapet. Now others, from the OIC, yes, but particularly from Asean, must follow – if the community the 10-nation association says it is building is to mean anything at all.
Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia