Half a Decade Later, Rohingya Refugees on a Road to Nowhere
As we approach the 6th year of the Rohingya refugee crisis, a look at the interventions made by international actors and the UN in particular that failed to act on the R2P principle in Myanmar.
Shweta Menon is a graduate student at the Max Bell School of Public Policy and is an Editor at The Bell. Prior to joining the Max Bell School, she has worked as a Research Associate with a Member of Parliament in India. She has also worked as a journalist where she covered the laws and policies of India. She is interested in the intersection of AI and gender-neutral laws.
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MYANMAR, A SMALL COUNTRY in the northeastern region of India and Bangladesh, was little known before 2017 due to its relatively minor role in international politics. Cut to 2017; the country has offered the world a recap of what ethnic cleansing looked like during the Nazi regime in Germany. In 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were made to leave their land following a military crackdown. According to the International Court of Justice, 600,000 Rohingya remain vulnerable to attacks and persecution in Myanmar.
Recently, the military seized control of the country on February 1, 2021, following a general election in which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won by a landslide. A year after the seizure, the military is believed to have killed more than 1,700 civilians, worsening the ongoing crisis.
The United Nations (UN) has terribly failed in following the principles of their Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The Responsibility to Protect principle “embodies a political commitment to end the worst forms of violence and persecution. It seeks to narrow the gap between Member States’ pre-existing obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, and the reality populations face at risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
To provide humanitarian aid in 2017, the UN needed the support of the government and the Buddhist majority, with the latter blocking attempts of aid delivery to Rohingya Muslims. To get access to the injured civilians, the UN took a passive stance by not speaking against the Rohingyas’ human rights and statelessness issue in fear of upsetting the majority. Several of the press releases issued by the UN during the crisis did not even find mention of the word Rohingyas, with several UN authorities avoiding any public statements on the issue. To continue its access to the country, the UN focussed on long-term development and capacity strategies that proved fatal for the Rohingya Muslims.
While Myanmar’s neighbours have stepped up their efforts to help the displaced Rohingya population, the half-hearted efforts have posed an additional challenge for the UN to manage the refugee population in these countries. In March 2019, the Bangladesh government announced that it would no longer accept Rohingya refugees. Bangladesh has already sent hundreds of Rohingya refugees to an island in the Bay of Bengal that often gets submerged due to monsoon rains, frequent cyclones, and storms. After much criticism, the government of Bangladesh, with the help of UN aid, did develop sea walls, hospitals and schools, but rights groups still express concerns about the island’s living conditions. The government maintains the stance of the island being a temporary location since they expect the refugees to go back to Myanmar eventually. They have also made repeated calls to ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) to pressure the Myanmar government to take back the refugees.
ASEAN, too, has failed to strike a meaningful conversation with military officials since the coup took charge and notably excluded Myanmar’s coup leaders from its annual summit in 2021 because they failed to progress on an ASEAN-brokered peace plan – a five-point statement demanding the “immediate cessation of violence” and calling on all parties in the country to exercise “utmost restraint”. In February 2022, the Prime Minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen (Cambodia currently holds the Chairmanship of ASEAN), stated, “I’m in a situation where I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t, so just let it be”, suggesting that he expects the next chair, Indonesia to do something about the crisis.
An estimated 40,000 Rohingya are in India, with the Indian government allowing the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to carry out verification of only 14,000 refugees so far. This verification has allowed these Rohingya Muslims to have an identity card allowing for their identification as refugees in India. Though, several thousand with no identity cards continue to be referred to as ‘illegal immigrants in India. Like Bangladesh, India is not a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and does not have a domestic refugee protection framework. The Indian government’s varying standards in protecting Tibetans and Sri Lankans, as opposed to Rohingya Muslims, have been criticized.
On the Western front, it took the US five years to formally declare the atrocities and ethnic violence committed by the Myanmar military as a “genocide” against the Rohingya minority. How this acceptance plays out in the current situation is yet to be seen. Subject experts, however, indicate that the announcement could help ramp up pressure on the military junta and could provide ways through economic sanctions or international tribunals to hold military officials accountable for their actions.
While the R2P principle is key to addressing the humanitarian challenges of the Rohingya minority, it comes with its own set of issues that has paralysed the UN’s actions on the ground.
R2P isn’t seen as a principle that is the first choice of the UN since it is against the principle of respecting a country’s sovereignty. R2P allows the UN to engage in military actions if the Security Council passes a resolution. This directly undermines the sovereignty of a nation. Besides, the UN invoked the R2P doctrine in 2011 in Libya to combat the violence caused by Qaddafi’s security forces. The mission, which was supposed to be narrow in scope, i.e., protecting the civilians, was soon turned into a destabilizing regime operation. Though the regime was defeated, the civil war never ended, with the country being in a more unstable condition than in 2011. Thus, now, any attempt by the UN in terms of breaching a country’s sovereignty in the name of R2P is seen with much skepticism and no support.
One of the ‘complex’ aspects of a complex emergency is the number of actors involved. Bringing all those parties to a common ground to negotiate potential solutions is a task that is seldom attained. It becomes even more difficult in situations involving military coups and non-state armed forces that are not obliged under any conventions to follow the directions of the UN.
However, effective communication strategies could have played a vital role in some of the UN’s non-mission settings that have failed several times due to the downplaying of the crisis by the actors engaged on the ground. The criticism of the UN’s response in Myanmar was largely against the former Resident Coordinator, Renata Lok- Dessallien who was accused of downplaying the abuses against the Rohingya by discouraging public statements critical of the ruling government and by prioritising development strategies over human rights violations.
Therefore, in an instance of failure of proper communication by the Resident Coordinator, humanitarian aid workers should be relied on to get information on the volatility of a situation. The UN, especially for its non-mission settings, should deploy a humanitarian coordinator and not just a Resident Coordinator as the point of contact. As a part of R2P, the UN should also assess trigger points in a conflict and change the authorities required on the ground to avoid violent situations. A Resident Coordinator mainly responsible for state-building capacity has no key role to play when armed groups are killing civilians.
R2P is an underrated principle and must be reverberated more, especially when there is no active deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission. Given the volatility and the history of conflict between the Rohingyas and the Buddhist majority, the exodus should have been no surprise to the UN. The R2P was established with the motto of ‘never again’. However, there is a gap between establishing a principle and following it on the ground. Every conflict is unique, and thus, the failure of R2P in Libya in 2011 must not be seen as evidence enough to discard the conversation on the implementation of R2P.
In response to global trends where conflicts have been going on for decades, the UN should ensure that the Rohingya refugee crisis isn’t added to this list. Getting Security Council’s approval for military engagement would be difficult given China and Russia’s presence; however, the UN must strive to maintain R2P before the situation becomes tense again. Pressure from international leaders, protection of the displaced population, and negotiations for refugees in other countries must all come as a part of the strategy to protect the Rohingya Muslims.
The Bell is edited by Jaclyn Victor, Jason Kreutz, Shweta Menon and Phaedra de Saint-Rome of the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University.