[Yet Suu Kyi has watched her relationship with the generals deteriorate while she grows internationally isolated, dragging her heels and fumbling in response to the crackdown. Her preferred tactic of outsourcing the Rohingya issue to a growing number of commissions with international representation, including one led by the late United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, has been widely criticized, while Rohingya languish in Bangladesh and those left in Myanmar find their access to humanitarian aid, food and resources waning.]
By Shibani Mahtani, Reporter Wai
Moe
 |
|
U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan speaks while Myanmar’s de facto leader,
Aung San Suu Kyi, listens
in 2016. Suu Kyi appointed Annan to run the
first of several advisory
commissions on the Rohingya issue.
(Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty
Images)
|
SINGAPORE
— A year ago, the Myanmar military embarked on
a sweeping crackdown in restive Rakhine state — driving out almost a million
Rohingya to Bangladesh and creating one of the world’s largest refugee camps
while allegedly raping women, killing children and beheading men in the
process.
Today, even as sanctions mount and the U.S.
State Department and United Nations ready reports that are likely to detail the
military’s premeditated efforts at effectively ridding the state of Rohingya
Muslims, generals remain defiant. They believe they essentially eliminated a
threat that was “growing bigger and bigger,” according to one account of
conversations top military leaders have had with counterparts from Southeast
Asia.
“There was a sense that their problem in
Rakhine had been solved, that this was their solution,” said a person familiar
with the conversations, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of
the issue. The militants, the military alleged, had embedded in villages and
towns, and they had to be stopped.
“They stand by their actions,” the person
added.
Interviews with a half-dozen former Myanmar
generals and those familiar with their thinking say they have also grown
irritated by civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts to quell international
outrage — believing she defends them in public while working to undermine them
by driving sanctions in private.
“Our relationship with the army is not that
bad,” Suu Kyi said Tuesday at a rare address here defending her government’s
handling of the crisis. The generals in her cabinet, she added, are “quite
sweet.”
Yet Suu Kyi has watched her relationship with
the generals deteriorate while she grows internationally isolated, dragging her
heels and fumbling in response to the crackdown. Her preferred tactic of
outsourcing the Rohingya issue to a growing number of commissions with
international representation, including one led by the late United Nations
Secretary General Kofi Annan, has been widely criticized, while Rohingya
languish in Bangladesh and those left in Myanmar find their access to humanitarian
aid, food and resources waning.
“We are still hopeless,” Kyaw Hla Aung, a
Rohingya lawyer living in a camp outside Sittwe, Rakhine state’s capital, said
in a phone interview. He and other Rohingya say security forces have arrived in
droves ahead of the conflict’s one-year mark, while doctors and aid workers have
not been seen for weeks.
This was not the reality Suu Kyi envisioned
in May 2016, her second month as the de facto leader of Myanmar’s civilian
government, when she approached Annan to lead a commission looking into the
root of the Rakhine conflict. The commission was to come up with
recommendations into how peace would be achieved in Rakhine state, where
communal violence had erupted in 2012, driving 140,000 Rohingya Muslims into
squalid camps. Members of the maligned minority group say they are native to
Myanmar but were excluded from a junta-era citizenship law, denied rights and
freedom of movement and rendered vulnerable as targets of extreme
discrimination and violence.
Annan, commission members said, negotiated
for months with Myanmar’s government to ensure he had a strong mandate — the
ability to fundraise independently, travel unencumbered around Rakhine state
and Myanmar and have staff within the country.
“We traveled widely, all the way from
Maungdaw in the north to Ngapali in the south,” said Laetitia van den Assum, a
member of the commission and a former Dutch ambassador to Thailand. “Annan
wrote to the government to ensure the commission was not just a useful shield
for them. We wanted to be taken seriously.”
In her address Tuesday, Suu Kyi paid tribute
to Annan, who died last week, for his commitment to the issue.
He “abided by his decision to help us, even
after events in Rakhine brought down severe criticism on Myanmar,” she said,
noting Annan made time to speak to her over the phone periodically on the
challenges her government was facing.
On Aug. 24 last year, after over 150
consultations and meetings, the commission presented its final report at a news
conference in Yangon. It included 88 recommendations on issues including
citizenship for the Rohingya, freedom of movement and education, and spelled
out how these should be implemented.
“There is no time to lose. The situation in
Rakhine state is becoming more precarious,” Annan said at the time.
Just eight hours after he spoke, Rohingya
militants allegedly staged 30 attacks on Myanmar police posts in northern
Rakhine state, according to the Myanmar military, prompting it to embark on a
“clearance operation,” sometimes with the help of armed Rakhine villagers.
Hundreds of Muslim villages were torched, and thousands were killed, and an
estimated 800,000 others hastily gathered their possessions and trekked across
the border to Bangladesh.
The Myanmar military and Suu Kyi’s government
were quick to deny allegations of ethnic cleansing. On Tuesday, she repeated
“terrorist activities” were the initial cause of the events that led to the
crisis in Rakhine state, and that the threat of terrorism remains.
Diplomats and aid workers in Myanmar,
however, said they had seen what looked like preparations for a large-scale
operation in the weeks leading up to the campaign. Security forces were
limiting the quantity of food available to Rohingya families, according to an
internal report shared with The Washington Post. Troops entering the area
confiscated kitchen knives and sticks from households.
Suu Kyi, aware of international pressure in
the wake of the violence, asked a new advisory board to implement the Annan
commission’s recommendations. It would be led by Surakiart Sathirathai, a
veteran Thai politician.
Among those asked to join was Bill
Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and governor of New
Mexico, who was an old friend of Suu Kyi’s.
“She told me that this would be a small group
of internationally acclaimed people who would help implement the Annan
commission’s report,” said Richardson in an interview.
Richardson agreed, stressing he was to have a
free hand, but was concerned by the change in tone he detected in the Nobel
laureate.
“I told her the [commission’s report] doesn’t
make her look good, and she started launching into it. She said, ‘Everybody is
against me, Bill, the human rights groups, your country,’” he recounted.
Giving the board a free rein was never her
intention, said Richard Horsey, a longtime Yangon-based political analyst.
Within weeks of the board’s first meeting in
Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, this January, Richardson quit.
“She’s in denial, and she’s not serious about
dealing with this issue,” he said of Suu Kyi. “Anything that involves taking on
the military, she won’t do. She’ll just do some PR moves like these
commissions.”
Other members found their hands similarly
tied. Kobsak Chutikul, a retired Thai lawmaker and diplomat who quit the board
in July, said he often spent his own money to travel around the country,
refusing to wait for a green light from the capital.
“It was a bit haphazard, because the Annan
commission had their own funding, and we didn’t,” Kobsak said.
Later, government officials in Naypyidaw
started making monthly financial transfers of approximately $15,000 to Bangkok
to support the work of the board, including renting an office space, but none
has been rented for at least half a year. There has been no request yet for
accounting or a return of this money, a board member said.
Myanmar government officials overseeing the
board and its funding did not respond to requests for comment.
Last Thursday, Surakiart was summoned to
Naypyidaw. He submitted the advisory board’s final report, and it was
dissolved, making way for yet another body, a commission of inquiry into the
wrongdoings in Rakhine state.
In a news conference last week, its chairman,
a Philippine diplomat named Rosario Manalo, said there will be “no blaming of
anybody” though the commission was ostensibly set up to pursue accountability.
“This just goes on and on. Next year it will
be another commission, another board,” Kobsak said. “It is all for show — there
is nothing real. It is a hoax.”
The commissions were formed “to find a
solution to the Rakhine crisis which will be acceptable at home and abroad,”
said Zaw Htay, a spokesman for the Myanmar government. Suu Kyi in her address
made a point of highlighting the work of the commission of inquiry, which she
said will start work next week.
Still, the Myanmar military has rebuffed even
Suu Kyi’s small efforts to look into its conduct in Rakhine state. Any
punishments for wrongdoing, said a former high-ranking general, speaking on the
condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, are
to be handled by the military without civilian interference.
The Myanmar government has promised to
resettle the hundreds of thousands of refugees now in Bangladesh and to close
the existing camps in Rakhine state, as an indication to those in Bangladesh
that it is safe to return.
But humanitarian access remains dire for the
Rohingya, and aid agencies have been unable to freely access communities in
northern Rakhine state. UNHCR and UNDP submitted requests for travel
authorizations to visit conflict-hit areas on June 14 and are still waiting for
responses. Large teams on the ground are languishing in hotels and field
offices, unable to do their jobs.
Aung Tun Thet, who coordinates the Myanmar
government’s humanitarian and development work in Rakhine state, said the
authorizations are in the process of being issued but the local situation
“remains fluid” and “risky.”
“The Myanmar government isn’t trustworthy.
They never do what they promise about Rohingya people. They have been cheating
us for decades,” said Muhammad Saeed, a Rohingya community leader in Sittwe.
“Rohingya from Myanmar [have a] message for their friends and family who fled
to Bangladesh,” he said. “It would be like stepping into hell if you came back
to Myanmar.”
Wai Moe reported from Yangon, Myanmar.
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