Intervention Of The Biden Administration Should Lead To An Improvement In The Conditions Of The Rohingya
By Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
January 30,
2021
The Trump
administration stopped short of categorizing the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar as
a genocide, despite it being the clearest example of one for at least two
decades.
Antony
Blinken, President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the State Department, has committed
to re-evaluating this determination. What, if anything, will come of this?
The facts are indisputable: After a multidecade campaign to
dehumanize the Rohingya minority on the basis of religion, language and skin
colour, the federal armed forces of Myanmar forced more than three quarters of
them from their native lands and pushed them over the border into Bangladesh
within the space of just six months in 2017-18, in what they described as
“clearing operations.”
Whenever
challenged by international commentators, the leaders of Myanmar — including
the erstwhile Nobel Peace Prize laureate, State Secretary Aung San Suu Kyi —
assert their sovereignty and right to act, on the basis of rejecting that the
Rohingya even exist. This is despite the fact that we can see them with our own
eyes, and their existence as a distinct, indigenous group in the area was
documented before any Western empire annexed the area. The case of their
persecution is currently being examined before the International Court of
Justice (ICJ).
So it is a
mystery why the Trump administration refrained from categorizing their plight
appropriately. Perhaps it was simply a case of people in glass houses not
throwing stones. Or perhaps it did not want to lend any more credibility to the
international institutional order that nominally judges and enforces these
kinds of rulings under the UN system, as it worked tirelessly to undermine
these institutions in other ways.
Neither of
these considerations should restrain the Biden administration, and nor are they
likely to. Both Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken are committed
internationalists with the utmost regard for international law and human
rights. So we should expect that the US position on the Rohingya situation
ultimately will be subject to the determination made by the ICJ when the case
is finally concluded.
In the
interim, Washington is likely to regard the situation as, indeed, a genocide,
even if only out of a principle of caution — there are still hundreds of
thousands of Rohingya in Myanmar, mostly living in extremely precarious
conditions in camps for internally displaced people, and they need the
international community to take a forceful stand to guarantee their safety.
Such a move
by Washington will have an immediate effect on all Rohingya, but especially
those in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The determination will prompt other
international powers to make their own determinations, most notably the
Europeans. They have been reticent to alienate the authorities in Myanmar, in
the hope that the country will continue to make progress in other areas,
particularly in its transition toward democracy.
Between the
US and Europe, much more humanitarian funding will start flowing toward the
refugee camps in Bangladesh, and the authorities in Dhaka will finally see some
much-needed financial relief from the pressures they have been facing since the
refugee crisis started.
Moreover,
the Myanmar government’s room for manoeuvre will be severely constrained, and
it will be forced to make immediate improvements, at the very least to the
conditions of the Rohingya who remain in the country. It will also have to
start thinking more seriously about some kind of long-term resolution of the
situation it has created, for all Rohingya — or face a return to the kind of
internal isolation it experienced in past decades, except now with the added
threat of political and economic over-reliance on a hyper-assertive Beijing.
Whatever
comes next, the announcement by the new team in Washington is good news. As
always, these situations are delicate and there are inherent risks in such
moves but, overall, we should expect that the intervention of the Biden
administration should lead to an improvement in the conditions of the Rohingya
in relatively short order.
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Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a director at the Centre
for Global Policy and author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide”
(Hurst, 2017).
Original Headline: Will Biden call the Rohingya
crisis a genocide?
Source: The Arab News
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-west/intervention-biden-administration-lead-improvement/d/124181
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