LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS CONFERENCE ON DECADES OF PERSECUTION ON ROHINGYA: A GENOCIDE? A public event co-sponsored by: LSE Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit & Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK) Time & Date: 8.30‐17.00m, 28 April 2014 Venue: The Shaw Library (Founders Room) London School of Economics and Political Science To RSVP please email: [email protected]or [email protected], or text 0788 871 4866 (UK) A public event co-sponsored by: LSE Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit & Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK) Time & Date: 8.30‐17.00m, 28 April 2014 Venue: The Shaw Library (Founders Room) London School of Economics and Political Science To RSVP please email: [email protected]or [email protected], or text 0788 871 4866 (UK)
Transcript
LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICSCONFERENCE ON
DECADES OF PERSECUTION ON ROHINGYA: A GENOCIDE?
A public event co-sponsored by:
LSE Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit &
The Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar (officially estimated at more than 1 million) are, by any standards, among theworld’s most severely persecuted ethnic groups. Their death and destruction of the morally obliges the debate: Is this decades-longpersecution by the successive Myanmar governments since 1978 in fact ‘genocide’? “The crime of genocide” is defined as “the acts(conducts) committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
This one-day conference on the plight of the Rohingya will bring together internationally renowned researchers andactivists on Rohingya persecution; concerned academics from the field of international genocide studies and criminology, practitionerswith first-hand involvement in previous genocide tribunals such as Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and Rwanda. The speakers and participantswill present their research findings, discuss various international human rights laws, and brainstorm ways to bring an end to one of theworld’s longest state-directed persecutions of an ethnic and religious group. The discussants will offer evidence and explanationsbehind the long-running persecution.
A Brief Background
As a group, the Rohingyas’ ancestral home straddles the Myanmar/Burma’s strategically important Western regioncalled Arakan (now Rakhine) and the neighbouring Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. The Rohingya’s demographic and ethnic historyis not different from the histories of the country’s other ‘borderland’ ethnic peoples such as the Kachin, the Chin, the Karen, the Shan,the Wa, the Naga, the Shan Chinese and so on, whose ancestral roots predate the post-World War II emergence of new modernnation-states.
Unlike other groups, the Rohingya have been subjected to a government-organized systematic campaign of masskilling, terror, torture, attempts to prevent births on the basis of ethnicity, forced labor, severe restrictions on physical movement, largescale internal displacement (estimated at 140,000), sexual violence, arbitrary arrest, summary execution, land-grab and communitydestruction. Myanmar’s three-decades of policies have produced conditions of life for the Rohingya where the doctor-patient ratio is1: 80,000 ( the national average is about 1:400), the infant mortality rate is three times the country’s average, 90% of Rohingya aredeliberately left illiterate in a country with one of the highest adult literacy rates in all of Asia. Moreover, the Rohingya are periodicallyblocked from accessing basic humanitarian assistance provided, for instance, by the Nobel Prize-winning organization Doctors withoutBorders. Consequently, there have been an unknown number of deaths and large scale exoduses overland and sea to Bangladesh,Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Australia and Canada.
As early as 1978 the first Myanmar government-organized campaign against the Rohingya was launched, in the guiseof an illegal immigration crack-down. Consequently, about 200,000 Rohingya became the first significant exodus/population transferinto newly-independent Bangladesh where they have been equally un-welcome. Even then the Far Eastern Economic Review framedthe plight of the Rohingya as “Burma’s Apartheid”. Nearly four decades on, South Africa’s Desmond Tutu, the veteran anti-apartheidcampaigner in his homeland, coined the same word, apartheid, to characterize the Rohingya oppression during his visit to Rangoon.
The Rohingya have been living in what is now Myanmar for generations – if not a millennium. Within a decade ofindependence from Britain in 1948, the Government of the Union of Burma officially recognized the Rohingya, the group’s collectiveself-referential historical identity. As well as being recognized as one of Myanmar’s distinct ethnic groups and granted full citizenshiprights, as evidenced in the entry under “Rohingya” in the official Encyclopedia of the Union of Burma (1964), the Rohingya wereallowed to take part in numerous acts of citizenship, such as serving in the then democratic parliament. They were able to broadcastthrice-weekly in their own mother tongue, Rohingya, on Myanmar’s sole National Broadcasting Service (Burma Broadcasting Service orBBS) and held positions in the country’s security forces and other ministries. They were permitted to form their own communal,professional and student associations bearing the name ‘Rohingya’, and above all, granted a Special Administrative Region for the twolarge pockets in Western Burma made up of 75 percent Rohingya Muslims.
Human Rights Watch, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Irish Human Rights Centre frame the Rohingyapersecution as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. This Spring, the University of Washington Law School’s academicjournal “Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal” is scheduled to publish a three-year study of Myanmar’s atrocities against the groupentitled “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya“
Misleadingly, international media and foreign governments have characterized the Rohingya persecution as“sectarian” or “communal” largely ignoring the instrumental role Myanmar’s successive governments have played in the death anddestruction of the Rohingya as the country’s most vulnerable ethnic group.
SPEAKERS
Welcome Remarks Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE – Founding Director, Refugee Studies Centre; Professor Emeritus, OxfordUniversity & Director, Fahamu Refugee Programme
An appeal to the world Tun Khin – President of Burmese Rohingya Organization UK. (BROUK)
What is a genocide? Who decides?Professor Daniel Feierstein - President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Director of the Centre for Genocide Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; Professor in the Faculty of Genocide at the University of Buenos Aires & author of “Genocide as a Social Practice: Reorganizing Society Under the Nazis and Argentina's Military Juntas” (2014)
International Human Rights Law and Mechanisms for Pursuit of JusticeProfessor Gabriele Della Morte - Professor of International Law at the Università Cattolica di Milano, counsel for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) (2003-2004), Law Clerk for the Prosecutor Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (2000), and a member of a government delegation for the establishment of the International Criminal Court (1998)
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge Tribunal: one model for a combined national and international judicial mechanismDr Helen Jarvis- formerly Chief of Public Affairs of the Cambodian Tribunal, Documentation Consultant for Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program and co-author of "Getting away with genocide? Elusive justice and the Khmer Rouge tribunal" (Pluto, 2004)
The Russell-Satre Tribunal and other alternative routes to international justiceProfessor Dr. Gianni Tognoni - The Secretary General of the Permanent People’s Tribunal, Rome
Defenseless Rohingya and their ProtectionNurul Islam – Chairman, Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO)
Bangladesh Government policies and the Situation of the Rohingya Refugees Dr Shapan Adnan - Research Associate, Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme, Oxford University &Former Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore
The Slow-Burning Genocide of the RohingyaDr Maung Zarni - Co-author of “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya”, Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, (Forthcoming, Spring 2014)
Mass Violence against Myanmar’s Muslims and State Persecution of Muslim RohingyaKyaw Win - General Secretary, Burmese Muslim Association, UK
The State in Myanmar and Its Crimes Professor Penny Green - Professor of Law and Criminology, Head of Research in the Dickson Poon School of Law and Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI), King’s College, University of London
Mapping and Tracking the Rohingya Persecution Christopher Tuckwood - Director, The Sentinel Project for the Prevention of Genocide, Canada
Mass Atrocities and How They End: Preliminary Findings from high intensity cases of mass killings Professor Bridget Conley - Assistant Professor of Research, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Boston & formerly Director of Research, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC
Marching to Genocide in BurmaTom Andrews - Former US Congressman & President of United to End Genocide (UEG), Washington, DC [or Daniel Sullivan, UEG and co-author of the report “Marching to Genocide in Burma”, (March 2014)]
