[Among
the Rohingya, there is trepidation that Myanmar’s military rulers would be
worse than the ousted civilian-led government, Tun Khin, president of the
Burmese Rohingya Organization UK, told The Washington Post.]
The
developments are being watched with particular alarm across the border in
Bangladesh, where more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims have sought refuge since
2017 after fleeing a military-led crackdown on their communities in Myanmar.
Among
the Rohingya, there is trepidation that Myanmar’s military rulers would be
worse than the ousted civilian-led government, Tun Khin, president of the
Burmese Rohingya Organization UK, told The Washington Post.
“This
military is very brutal, and Rohingya worry that the military may commit more
violence against Rohingya,” Khin said. “We worry more may flee.”
Until
Sunday, the past decade was one of a rocky transition to democracy in Myanmar.
The military junta, installed in 1962, began ceding power and in 2016 formed an
uneasy alliance with Suu Kyi, whom it had held under house arrest for 15 years.
But
alongside these political changes came a violent military-led campaign against
the Rohingya in 2017, which United Nations investigators concluded in 2018 had
“genocidal intent.” The military rejected the findings,
claiming instead that it has faced an insurgency among the Rohingya, an ethnic
minority.
[U.N.
report calls for Myanmar generals to be prosecuted for genocide, war crimes]
Kaamil
Ahmed, a journalist previously based in Bangladesh who is writing a history of
Rohingya refugees, said the United States and others in the international
community initially sought to tread softly around majority-Buddhist Myanmar’s
treatment of the Muslim Rohingya to protect what they hoped would be the
country’s democratic transition.
That
calculus, he said, could change in the wake of the coup.
“If
that facade [of a democratic transition] has been destroyed, then there’s a
question about whether the international community, and especially the new
Biden administration, is going to be more forthright,” Ahmed said.
“The
Rohingya are begging for a more serious international intervention, one that
actually acknowledges what is happening,” he continued. “It hasn’t come, it
seems, because they have seemed so invested in a democratic transition in
Myanmar. And now the question is: Is that going to change?”
In
recent years, Suu Kyi — who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle for
democracy in Myanmar — began to lose her global standing as she became a public
defender of the military’s campaigns.
In
2019, Suu Kyi appeared before the International Court of Justice to answer
questions about the 2017 razing of Rohingya communities, during which she
refused to even say the word “Rohingya” and defended the government against
accusations of genocide. She has also appeared to support the military’s claim
that members of the long-persecuted minority are illegal immigrants from
Bangladesh.
[How
Aung San Suu Kyi, arrested Myanmar leader, went from Nobel Peace Prize to
pariah]
But
rather than gloating at Suu Kyi’s fall, Ahmed said, many Rohingya are feeling
further disappointment that conditions in Myanmar are not improving.
That
sentiment is clashing with messaging from Bangladesh, which has been ramping up
pressure on Rohingya refugees to return to Myanmar.
More
than 1 million Rohingya live in overcrowded refugee camps in the town of Cox’s
Bazar in Bangladesh. They are forbidden from opening schools, and economic
conditions, as well as mental and physical health, continue to worsen in the
camps amid the coronavirus pandemic. The massive influx of people in
2017 was the largest yet in the waves of Rohingya who have crossed into
Bangladesh since 1978 to escape spikes in persecution at home. Since the 1990s,
Bangladesh has periodically forced some Rohingya to return to Myanmar, though
others have kept coming.
Bangladesh
has long warned that it can’t handle the refugees on its own. In December, it
began implementing a strategy first floated in 2015: relocating Rohingya to the remote Bhasan Char island in
the Bay of Bengal, despite complaints from human rights groups that the island
is ill-suited to host people and that relocations are being conducted without
informed consent.
On
Saturday, the government sent its fourth group of Rohingya — numbering about
1,460 — to the island, where it has built infrastructure to accommodate about
100,000 people.
None
of this bodes well for the Rohingya, Ahmed said.
“In
terms of the Rohingya, there’s been no real international action,” he said.
“There’s been no pressure to make sure Myanmar creates safer conditions.”