Episode #210: Echoes of Genocide
Andrea Gittleman’s relationship to Myanmar goes back 15 years, when she was working with the Burma Lawyers’ Council in Mae Sot. Operating on a shoestring budget, it was charged with educating Burmese migrants about their labor rights in Thailand. This work ended up including documenting atrocities that had been committed back in Myanmar, which taught her firsthand about the regime’s grim track record of human rights violations. “There was an effort to galvanize international momentum, to establish a commission of inquiry, have a formal investigative body, and look at what crimes had been committed,” she describes. “This was part of a broader effort to have an international demand for accountability reflecting what a lot of the community-based organizations had been doing for so long.”
For a young lawyer, it was certainly exciting work to be doing at ground level, and it had a profound impression on Gittleman. “People were telling me stories of conflicts that had been going on for decades,” she recalls. “Even though I was working with people from a number of different communities, there were these common threads among a lot of their experiences, and that's something that that carries forward today.”
For Gittleman, the experience also highlighted the divergence between classroom study and on-the-ground experience. “We learn about the legal regimes, we learn about norms, but I feel like it's so often divorced from the experiences of people who are doing the frontline work of tracking these crimes, and often, sadly, suffering from them.” Her work covers not just documentation, but also advocacy, and she laments how very infrequently Myanmar’s cycle of oppression catches the attention of American policymakers. “For people from Burma, for communities who are under threat, and for the activists who are continuing to document what's happening, it's so frustrating to only have these brief windows where you can reach an audience, because for people in Burma, there aren't only specific windows during which they might be threatened! This is something that has been continuous.”
Today, Gittleman is the policy director for the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In 1993, the center established the Committee on Conscience, whose mission has been to identify early warning signs of mass atrocities or genocide, and engage in advocacy that can prevent or limit the harm. The Rohingya crisis became a primary area of focus for the committee, and so Gittleman’s Myanmar expertise deeply informs her current role at the museum.
As early as 2013, the center began tracking incidents of violence against the Rohingya people, and in 2014 it commissioned a report carrying the bold headline, “A Countryside of Concentration Camps.” This is quite a powerful choice of words from an organization founded on Holocaust remembrance! They continued to press the issue even as the Obama administration lauded the country’s emerging democratic transition; in fact, the report specifically challenged the prevailing notion that things were getting better in the country. “There was so much optimism, which was well deserved on many fronts, but everyone we talked to said, ‘You're forgetting what's happening to us! You're forgetting what's happening beyond Yangon. You're forgetting what's happening in the periphery where conflict is still raging.’ They’re forgetting about this entrenched persecution against the Rohingya community on the basis of their identity. What kind of democratic transition will be successful if built upon the history of the legacy of violence and persecution?” For Gittleman, by avoiding “the structures of inequality of discrimination” that has long persisted within Burmese society, the benefits of the transition simply did not reach many communities.
The center’s work eventually did impact someone of consequence in Washington: US Secretary of State, Andrew Blinken, has credited his March, 2022, visit to the museum’s Rohingya exhibit, “Burma’s Path to Genocide,” as informing his declaration that the military’s atrocities did indeed meet the legal definition of genocide. “The determination was made, and in our opinion, reflects the facts of the case,” Gittleman says. “Reasonable minds can disagree on legal analysis. Genocide is a very specific crime that includes not only enumerated acts, but acts against a protected group with the specific intent to destroy in whole or in substantial part that group.” This is an important point, as some observers, such as the author and former diplomat, Derek Tonkin, have publicly challenged the assertion that the Rohingya crisis can be considered a genocide. But Gittleman stresses that, this disagreement notwithstanding, “genocide determinations are not a particular end goal of policymakers, and no one is cheering when a genocide determination is made, because that means we have all failed yet again to prevent genocide from happening!” For her and the center’s work, what comes after the determination is far more important, because it carries the tangible potential of protecting innocent lives that may still be in harm’s way. “Those determinations can create moments of momentum of political opportunity,” she says simply.
One objective of the museum’s Rohingya exhibit is to bring the realities of this tragedy home to guests. It features first-hand interviews with Rohingya survivors, alongside social media posts from government and military leaders denying the atrocities, and is interspersed with a range of video clips and arresting photography, it is quite a powerful experience for many. “One of the things we tried to do with the exhibition is allow visitors to try to grapple with some of these difficult problems in the lead-up to the genocide, when early warning signs were evident, and when genocide perhaps could have been prevented… what could have been done then? It forces some serious introspection and tries to, on a personal level, allow people to grapple with what could have been done.”
Since the 2021 military coup, the museum has continued to prioritize the showcasing of the ongoing atrocities in Myanmar, recognizing that many ethnic and religious minorities are now facing unimaginable horror. From pushing for sanctions on jet fuel to hosting their own panel exploring the crisis to supporting civil society groups on the ground, they have continued to engage whenever possible. “There aren't even coordinated efforts… to restrict the items that the military is using, and that it would need to continue its violent campaign against its people! So there is a lot more that can be done,” she says.
“We want to make sure that we're doing what we can to share this information with the public and those who are able to spread it within their networks,” she says in closing. “We’re trying to keep momentum going and keep a focus on the plight of people at risk of atrocities across Burma, and doing what we can to make sure that that policy conversations can continue to take that with the utmost seriousness.”
[The photo on the template is courtesy of Paula Bronstein Getty Images Reportage for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]