{"id":657320,"date":"2018-09-01T03:33:29","date_gmt":"2018-09-01T00:33:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/tr\/content\/?p=657320"},"modified":"2018-09-01T03:33:29","modified_gmt":"2018-09-01T00:33:29","slug":"its-time-to-hold-myanmar-accountable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2018\/09\/01\/its-time-to-hold-myanmar-accountable\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Hold Myanmar Accountable"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

A year after the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya began, the United States is still dragging its feet. <\/strong><\/p>\n

By Michael H. Fuchs<\/em><\/p>\n

| August 31, 2018, 12:36 PM<\/p>\n

A man stands under an umbrella as monsoon rains arrive in Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on Aug. 28. More than 700,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh. (Paula Bronstein\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The Holocaust. Rwanda. Bosnia. Darfur.<\/p>\n

And now Myanmar, according to a new United Nations report, which accuses the country of carrying out a genocide. It is time for the United States and the world to act.<\/p>\n

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In 2017, Myanmar\u2019s military began a ruthless campaign against Rohingya Muslims, killing thousands and displacing more than 700,000 to Bangladesh. Last week, a year after the massacres, the U.N. fact-finding mission on Myanmar found that the \u201ccrimes in Rakhine State [in Myanmar\u2019s west], and the manner in which they were perpetrated, are similar in nature, gravity and scope to those that have allowed genocidal intent to be established in other contexts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Myanmar\u2019s military, made the army\u2019s intentions clear: \u201cThe Bengali problem was a long-standing one which has become an unfinished job despite the efforts of the previous governments to solve it. The government in office is taking great care in solving the problem,\u201d he said in a Facebook post during the crackdown. (In Myanmar, Rohingya are commonly referred to as Bengali, although they have lived in Myanmar for generations.) The newly released report recommends the \u201cinvestigation and prosecution\u201d of senior members of the Myanmar military to \u201cdetermine their liability for genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

This genocide took place against the backdrop of Myanmar\u2019s recent steps toward democratic transformation. After decades of repressive military rule, the armed forces began freeing political prisoners, including opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi, and allowing economic and political reforms\u2014and in 2015, the country held real elections. Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s political party, the National League for Democracy, won control of the civilian government. Life in Myanmar seemed to be improving. But the democratization process did not reach everyone. The military retained extraordinary powers. And the Rohingya\u2014long persecuted by the majority Buddhist population\u2014remained outsiders, vulnerable to the cruelty of the government.<\/p>\n

The United States supported the democratization process as the best way to promote broad-based progress in Myanmar. After decades of sanctions and isolation, the Obama administration decided to meet action with action, dropping sanctions and providing support for reform each time Myanmar took another positive step, with the intent of supporting the country as long as it remained on that path.<\/p>\n

Today, it is clear that Myanmar is no longer on that path. Whatever good may be accruing for some there through the political reform process must not be bought with the price of genocide. The world must respond.<\/p>\n

There is no guarantee that concerted international action can change Myanmar\u2019s policies\u2014but we must try. The crisis is ongoing, with hundreds of thousands living in refugee camps and thousands more in danger in Myanmar. And after standing by in the face of the crisis a year ago, the world is now also faced with establishing justice and showing Myanmar\u2014and other countries\u2014that genocide will be punished unequivocally, and that the country must change.<\/p>\n

First, the United States must go to the U.N. Security Council to seek a global arms embargo on Myanmar, sanction top military officials, and demand equal legal protections for the Rohingya, the safe return of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, and access to Rakhine by international nongovernmental organizations and the U.N.<\/p>\n

Second, the United States should immediately make clear that the civilian government of Myanmar, including Aung San Suu Kyi, will be held to account if it does not take these steps to improve the situation for the Rohingya soon. While the military is the prime mover of these atrocities, as the U.N. report put it, \u201cThrough their acts and omissions, the civilian authorities have contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Third, Myanmar should be at the top of the agenda when the United States meets with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations at their semi-annual summit meetings in November. As the State Department official charged with steering the U.S.-ASEAN relationship on a daily basis for three years, I recognize this is a difficult task\u2014ASEAN members will want to protect Myanmar from what they perceive as outside criticism, just as I watched the nations rally around Thailand after the 2014 coup. But these atrocities cannot be swept under the rug, and Muslim-majority ASEAN countries may be inclined to apply more pressure\u2014Indonesia has already raised the issue, and Malaysia has now taken in more than 100,000 Rohingya refugees.<\/p>\n

Fourth, the United States must fundamentally rethink its relationship with Myanmar. In May, Mark Green, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said of the Rohingya crisis, \u201cThis is a country that I think has tremendous potential. There\u2019s an impediment to that work\u2014and that is the crisis that we\u2019re talking about\u2014but we believe that in the long-term future we can address this impediment.\u201d While a return to the international isolation of previous decades is unlikely to achieve results and should not be on the table, the United States can no longer act as though the Rohingya are but one of many issues Myanmar is struggling with as part of its reform process.<\/p>\n

The international community should shun Myanmar\u2019s military brass and work to ensure the benefits of economic assistance and trade do not go to the military\u2019s coffers, and the United States should make clear that this will continue until persecution of the Rohingya ends.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has been behind the curve for a year and is likely to keep dragging its feet. Support for more pressure is growing in Congress, but many still fear weakening Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. Furthermore, many senior Trump administration officials view everything in Asia through a lens of competition with China, and the argument that the United States cannot lose influence in Myanmar is likely to hold sway. If the Trump administration does not move quickly, Congress may need to force the administration to act by moving legislation on its own, as it did when it passed sanctions on Russia over Trump\u2019s objections in 2017.<\/p>\n

Looking back, I believe that the United States was right to embrace Myanmar\u2019s political transformation as a genuine opportunity that held promise to improve the lives of millions. The United States consistently pressed Myanmar to improve its treatment of the Rohingya in meetings and in public, but it is clear that it should have done more in the years prior to 2017. The United States failed miserably in responding to the horrors as they unfolded over the course of August and September 2017, when the latest crackdown began. It is difficult to know if a different U.S. policy at any point would have helped prevent the atrocities. But what matters today is that the United States must change course.<\/p>\n

In my time working in the East Asia bureau at the U.S. State Department, I traveled many times to Myanmar and worked closely with colleagues in the civilian government as the country undertook its process of democratization. Citizens and officials I met wanted more reform, more openness, and more opportunities to engage with the United States. I wanted the country to succeed. I still want it to succeed.<\/p>\n

But the Myanmar government has failed not only its Rohingya people\u2014it has failed its entire population. For Myanmar to have a chance to succeed in the future, leaders must be held responsible, and policies must fundamentally change. The United States and the world should not rest until justice is done.<\/p>\n

Michael H. Fuchs<\/strong> is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. From 2013 to 2016, he was a deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 A year after the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya began, the United States is still dragging its feet. By Michael H. Fuchs | August 31, 2018, 12:36 PM A man stands under an umbrella as monsoon rains arrive in Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on Aug. 28. More than 700,000 Rohingya refugees […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4092,"featured_media":183543,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[10428],"class_list":["post-657320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-myanmar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4092"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}