UN Court rules that Myanmar must stop Rohingya genocide

The International Court of Justice in the Hague, the highest court of the United Nations, has just given a landmark ruling on a case involving the treatment of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. The Court has declared that the violence being perpetrated against the country’s Muslim minority is classified as “at serious risk of genocide” under the terms of the UN’s genocide convention. The ICJ has called for the government of Myanmar to implement measures to promote “ethnic conciliation”.

The case was brought by the West African nation of the Gambia against Myanmar in November 2019. The government of the Gambia urged that emergency provisions needed to be made to protect Muslim minorities from ethnic cleansing in the country.

The President of the Court, Abdulqawi Yusuf, proclaimed to a packed courtroom that

“The Court notes that the results of the (UN) fact-finding mission have indicated that since October 2016 the Rohingya in Myanmar have been subjected to acts which are capable of affecting their existence as a protected group under Genocide Convention.”

The court’s ruling said that Myanmar must now “take all measures within its power to prevent all acts that amount to or contribute to the crime of genocide”, including preventing “military, paramilitary, or irregular armed units” which may be directed “against the Rohingya group.”

In August 2017, the military generals in charge of Myanmar’s government launched a “security clearance operation” in Rakhine State, in the north of Burma, the home of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. This operation left thousands dead and forced a total of 740,000 Rohingya – including 400,000 children – to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. The Rohingya men, women, and children who have survived and fled have given harrowing testimonies of their experiences.

The government of Myanmar has long refused to recognise that the Rohingya, who are Bengali in their origins, have a right to citizenship in Buddhist-majority Burma. The military campaign in 2017 was only the latest of a series of crimes committed against Rohingya people in the country going back to 1978.

The ruling of the ICJ comes just over a month after the Nobel Peace laureate and de facto Prime Minister of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, was summoned to the Hague in December 2019 to answer the charges of genocide brought before her country’s government.

In her statements in the Hague on 11 December, Suu Kyi denied that country’s military acted with “genocidal intent” against the country’s Muslim minority. Suu Kyi  accused the prosecution of painting “misleading and incomplete picture of the situation” in Rakhine State, where the atrocities have taken place.

Suu Kyi instead portrayed the events in Rakhine as an “internal armed conflict” between the army and insurgents led by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). She conceded that government troops may not have distinguished “clearly enough between fighters and civilians”, but argued that the military was trying to restore order and conduct “counter-insurgency operations”.

Her testimony flew in the face of the evidence gathered by UN investigators who have visited Rakhine. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in September 2017 described the military’s actions as amounting to “ethnic cleansing”. The UN presented an inquiry in May 2019 testifying to the “repression and human rights violations on a massive scale”.

Suu Kyi was once famous for her advocacy of democracy and human rights in a country governed by a military regime and divided between disparate ethnic and religious groups. In 1991, the Nobel Committee awarded Suu Kyi their Peace Prize “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”, lauding “her unflagging efforts” to support “ethnic conciliation by peaceful means.”

For many who once held up Suu Kyi as a hero of Myanmar’s fight for human rights and democracy, her defence was seen as a tragic betrayal of her principles.

The figure who spearheaded the case against the Burmese government in the ICJ was the Gambian Justice Minister, Abubacarr Tamadou. He called for his country’s government to file the case after he had visited a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where many Rohingya Muslims have fled since 2017.

In an interview with the BBC, Tamdou compared the plight of the Rohingya to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, a tragedy which claimed the lives of 800,000 people. He spoke out against what he sees as “the stench of genocide” in the accounts he had heard from the survivors who had Myanmar:

“Military and civilians would organise systematic attacks against Rohingya, burn down houses, snatch babies from their mothers’ arms and throw them alive into burning fires, round up and execute men; girls were gang-raped and put through all types of sexual violence.” 

The Cox’s Bazar camp is now the world’s largest refugee settlement. Conditions are desperately overcrowded, and the UN is struggling to provide support for the influx of refugees. The survivors, meanwhile, fight onwards with their own struggle, haunted by the harrowing experiences which have forced them to flee their homeland.