Rohingyas have continuedly persecuted and marginalized…

A report published by United Nations (UN) investigators in August 2018 accuses Myanmar’s military of carrying out mass killings and rapes with “genocidal intent”, but the United States (U.S.) government hasn’t declared Rohingyas as the victim of Genocide.

“When you see a genocide, when you document a genocide, anywhere in the world, and the evidence is clear, then you ought to say it, as a starting point”, said Mr. Posner, now an ethics and finance professor and director of the Centre for Business and Human Rights at New York University.

On 11th November 2019, the Gambia filed a lawsuit against the Republic of the Union Myanmar in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the bases of genocidal allegations. On 23rd of January at the request of the Gambia, the ICJ ordered the government of Myanmar to take immediate actions to protect the Rohingya while the case proceedings continue.

Rohingya is a distinct Muslim ethnic group in Rakhine sate of Myanmar. Rohingya have their own language and culture and believe that they are the descendants of Arab traders from the past and have been in the region for centuries.

In 2014, after 30 years, Myanmar partnered with the UN population fund for its census and the questionnaire used for survey consisted of a list supposedly to identify the ethnicities, but the list was from 1982 and it consisted the names of 135 ethnic groups which didn’t include Rohingya.

Initially the government promised they would let Rohingya register through the ‘Other’ option. Two days into the renumeration process the international workers fled as they were attacked by the Buddhist mobs. The government decided not to reinforce counting in the region on the security grounds and Rohingya went uncounted making them very stateless.

There have been instances of violence in the past as well. In 2012, violence erupted between ethnic Rakhines and Rohingyas and the conflict resulted in involvement of security forces and 140,000 people mostly Rohingyas, being detained in government-built camps. 

It can be established from the past incidents that Rohingyas have not been accepted by the government as the equal citizens with equal rights. Rohingyas have continuedly persecuted and marginalized, a Bangkok- based human rights organizations names this a deliberate state designed ‘policies of persecution’.

The hate against Rohingyas is deliberately spread through Facebook, Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook. In aBBC interview with a Village Administrator in Rakhine, he described Rohingyas in one word ‘Terrorist’.

Over a million Rohingya have fled the violence in Myanmar since 1990s, and the latest exodus began on 25th August 2017 when violence broke out in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. According to the UN refugee agency’s report more than 742,000 left Myanmar to seek refuge in Bangladesh, mostly arrived in the first three months of the violence. The routes to the place of persecution were blocked, so it was not possible for the international aid organizations to reach out for help as well.

“They burnt our house and drove us out by shooting. We walked for three days through the jungle”, said Mohammed, who fled to Bangladesh with his family of seven, including a baby born along the way.

In March-April 2018, the highly trained and experienced investigators on the PILPG investigation team collected 1,024 interviews from a representative sample of Rohingya refugees across all the refugee camps. After the investigation and carefully reviewing, a 15,000 pages of documentation from those interviews ultimately identified more than 13,000 instances of documented human rights violations including indiscriminate killings, mass killings, executions, rapes, gang rapes, beatings, mutilations and many other such acts.

Trump administration didn’t declare Rohingya as the victims of genocide, however he sanctioned the military leaders involved in the genocide. Many human rights agencies are pushing President Biden to declare them as the victims of the Genocide.

Jaafar Siddiqui earned Bachelors in Journalism from the University of Hertfordshire — United Kingdom. He writes for The Milli Chronicle on Business, Politics, and Culture.

The Ottoman Empire arrested and ultimately killed hundreds of the Armenian intelligentsia.

Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday that the 1915 massacres and forced deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide, a move that infuriated Turkey and further strained frayed ties between the two NATO allies.

Here is some background to the issue.

What happened in 1915?

In the late 19th century the Ottoman Empire’s roughly two million Armenians began to assert nationalist aspirations.

Repression by Ottoman irregulars, mainly Kurds, led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Armenians in 1894-1896 in eastern Anatolia, now eastern Turkey. Several thousand more were killed in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in August 1896 after Armenian militants seized the Ottoman Bank.

As the Ottomans fought Russian forces in eastern Anatolia in World War One, many Armenians formed partisan groups to assist the invading Russian armies.

On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Empire arrested and ultimately killed hundreds of the Armenian intelligentsia.

In May 1915, Ottoman commanders began mass deportation of Armenians from eastern Anatolia. Thousands were marched south towards Syria and Mesopotamia. Armenians say some 1.5 million died in massacres or of starvation and exhaustion in the desert.

What does Turkey say?

The Turkish republic, established in 1923 after the Ottoman empire collapsed, has always denied there was a systematic campaign to annihilate Armenians.

It says that thousands of Turks and Armenians died in inter-ethnic violence as the empire started to fall apart and fought a Russian invasion of its eastern provinces during World War One.

How are Turkish-Armenian relations now?

Seeking to bury a century of hostility, the two countries signed a peace accord in 2009 which called for the creation of a commission of international experts to study the 1915 killings, which Armenia insisted should be declared a genocide.

They agreed to establish diplomatic ties and open their border, subject to parliamentary approval of the deal. But Yerevan and Ankara accused each other of trying to re-write the texts, and within six months the ratification was suspended.

Armenia formally scrapped the deal in 2018.

Last year, Turkey strongly supported Azerbaijan in its six-week conflict with Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, when Azeri forces recaptured territory from Armenian troops.

What do other countries say?

The 1915 killings have been recognised as genocide in dozens of countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s lower house of parliament officially declared in 2019 that the events constituted genocide. Macron decreed that April 24 should be a day of annual commemoration.

In the same year, both chambers of the U.S. Congress passed resolutions saying the United States should commemorate the killings as genocide.