From The Bridge Initiative (Georgetown University)
by Arsalan Iftikhar | September 5, 2017
Under international law, the concept of “ethnic cleansing” was first officially investigated by the United Nations during the Balkan genocide in the former Yugoslavia during the mid-1990’s. A U.N. commission of experts generally defined the term “ethnic cleansing” as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” This same U.N. commission also found in its final report that ethnic cleansing was “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” These brutal coercive practices use to ethnically cleanse populations could include everything from murder, torture, arbitrary arrest/detention, extrajudicial executions, rape/sexual assaults, forcible exile, summary deportation and more.
Similarly, the international law definition of “genocide” resides within Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention & Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which defines the crime of genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
This is exactly what is happening to over 1 million Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar (the country formerly known as Burma) under the watchful eye of 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi as she does nothing to stop the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from her country.
The Economist recently said that the Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar may be “the most persecuted people in the world.” In a predominantly Buddhist country, they are an indigenous ethnic Muslim group who have lived for centuries in the Rakhine province of the Southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma. Although the Myanmar government disingenuously claims that these Rohingya Muslims are migrants from other neighboring countries like Bangladesh, the Arakan Rohingya National Organization has stated quite unequivocally that, “Rohingyas have been living in [the area known as Myanmar] from time immemorial.”
In 1982, Myanmar passed a citizenship law recognizing 8 different races and 130 minority groups — but somehow omitted the country’s 1 million Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar’s 60 million people. Many Myanmar Buddhists have always viewed the Rohingya as Muslim interlopers brought in by British colonialists from modern-day Bangladesh, which is why some of the most egregious Islamophobic incitement is coming from right-wing extremist Buddhist monks in Myanmar.
The flames of this genocidal ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims is currently being fanned by a Buddhist extremist movement known as “969” which portrays itself as a grassroots movement. Its chief proponent- an extremist Buddhist monk named Wirathu- was once jailed by the former military junta in Myanmar for anti-Muslim violence and he urges his fellow Buddhists to boycott Muslim shops and shun interfaith marriages with them. He also calls mosques “enemy bases” and he was once sentenced to 25 years in prison for distributing anti-Muslim pamphlets that incited communal riots in his hometown.
Most notoriously, this famous extremist Buddhist monk even once proudly referred himself as the “Burmese bin Laden.”
