A Perspective on the Rohingya Crisis
Although the podcast conversation with Erin Murphy ran long, clocking in at over two hours, the time seemed to fly by. After all, as a former CIA analyst who has worked on Myanmar issues for over a decade, Erin had a tremendous amount to share about her study of Myanmar during the democracy transition years of the 2010s, an immensely important time which shines a lot of light on the current revolution. For anyone who enjoyed this talk, consider picking up a copy of her new book, Burmese Haze. Following is one excerpt from our talk, in which Erin historically examined the roots and complexities of the Rohingya crisis.
“It takes big thinking, and funding and policy and constant gardening on these issues, to make sure that there’s some effect. No one’s been good at preventing a genocide!”
It was the only prism that anyone was looking at Myanmar through. I mean, was it awful? Yes, of course. And that's not to diminish anything about how bad the Rohingya issue was, but again, also not new. The pace of the refugees going to Bangladesh, that was the fastest movement - up until Ukraine - of people moving since World War Two. But the issue against the Rohingya has been going on since the ‘70s. I know Politico did a piece, ‘The Genocide the US Didn't See Coming.’ That's not true! We knew and had always known that this was an issue.
You have people who were desk officers in the ‘90s, trying to reach out to the IOC countries, Islamic organization countries, to try to do something on this. Could they take refugees? Is there any interest in supporting any resolutions in the UN? No interest whatsoever. No one wanted them in the Middle East. No one wanted them in Southeast Asia, and that includes in Indonesia and Malaysia. And it was a great domestic political point. But I had gotten so bad that, you know, there have been sparks of violence over the years, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2018.
These purges would, would happen; obviously, you can't ignore them, especially in the last one. Just to bemoan Myanmar's awful timing, is that if we can recall, and at least give her some credit, I mean, I'm not going to be Aung San Suu Kyi’s great defender, because I think she fell flat on this, and deserved criticism that she got. But I think, again, Myanmar deserves more nuance than what it received. And recognizing that, as you said, there are a host of issues going on, and sometimes they do not relate. And you don't compartmentalize them, but you deal with them in different ways. And Mitch McConnell understood this when I think it was Senators McCain and Cardin tried to push through certain Burma Acts around this. And then even after McCain's death, McConnell refused to put it on the calendar for a vote, because he's like, ‘They don't understand what kind of pressure she's under, and that she needs as much leverage with the military as possible to make sure that she can continue to stay in power.’
And I agree with him on that. Kofi Annan does his commission; Aung San Suu Kyi told them to be as upfront as possible. And then he delivers a report a year later. So you know, the Commission started in 2017 after some violence, and then is delivered in 2018. And the ARSA attacks happened on the next day. I mean, my God. Was it planned? I don't know. But it was just so terrible. And the military reacted, and it was a massacre. So what can you do then? [Do you] say, ‘Let's go back to the Kofi Annan commission report’? And Aung San Suu Kyi doesn't say anything! So how do we go from the 2017 Aung San Suu Kyi to the 2018 Aung San Suu Kyi, and I think that there's an important question there… of which I have zero answers.
But back home, the United States starts a conversation of, ‘Have we lifted sanctions too soon? If we had kept them in place, this would have never happened.’ Which I think is about the most ridiculous argument ever! There was an argument on keeping sanctions on the two military holding companies that you know had its fingers in some lucrative enterprises including ruby and jade sales, but those ruby and jade sales didn't happen in the United States; they went to markets in Hong Kong, Thailand, and China. Our sanctions can't touch that.
And I think the sanctions that are already in place, are not going to spook a military doesn't have like a Visa or MasterCard and look to go shopping in overseas. They see terrorists; they see Muslims, who they don't like. They got permission from a Buddhist monk where some did not like the idea of mowing down innocent, unarmed people. But you know, the military calls on a monk to tell them, cite some really ridiculous unknown eighth century sutra, saying that anybody who's not Buddhist is not human, or subhuman. That doesn't sound very Buddhist to me, but I don't see how sanctions could have prevented that. And frankly, no one was interested in the issue globally until they were. And everybody failed the Rohingya.
I'm not saying the US tried and was once denied, but it was also the victim of bad timing. It takes big thinking, and funding and policy and constant gardening on these issues, to make sure that there's some effect. No one's been good at preventing a genocide! There have been case studies assessing why, but to fix the problem so that it doesn't happen again, well, that takes a ton of resources. And we have political cycles, and political is going in and out. You have tight budgets. It's very hard to get people enthusiastic for putting in a lot of time into what is such a pressing and a hard thing to do.
I see that everywhere, though; everything's a hard problem. Look how well we dealt with COVID, inflation, all of these things; it's very easy to make it as black and white as possible, because the hard work is super hard. And it's not rewarding every day. You may not see the rewards in your lifetime. And that's very tough to deal with. But the thing is, Myanmar doesn't have to come up with a solution from scratch. I mean, this is the unfortunate thing. We've seen genocide in many, many a place. Perhaps the Balkans is a better example for them to go forward. But you know, any sort of national reconciliation, I think, at least with this National Unity Government, and also with people who have experienced the brutality of the military that never had before, [there is now] a lot more sympathy for the Rohingya. So, I think there is an understanding that they are part of the national reconciliation discussion. But, you know, if sanctions had been reimposed very quickly after the Rohingya crisis. Again, that wouldn't have prevented anything, very doubtful.