Through the years, since WWII, the Rohingya community in Myanmar has undergone numerous conflicts. In the second half of the twentieth century, the community became ‘stateless’ as they fled the country while escaping an unvarnished military regime. They were later subjected to organized ethnic cleansing operations instigated by the Myanmar government. The persecution against the Rohingya people in 2017 was one of the most brutal exercises of a meaningful change of identity.
As history repeats itself, this paper will show similarities between the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar and the European statelessness situation in Hannah Arendt’s piece “The decline of the nation-state and the End of The Right of Man” while referring to the concepts of human rights and where they stand in the international system. The central question discussed in the paper is: How does the notion of ‘statelessness’ shape what it means to be a citizen?
This paper will indicate the downside of the international legal system and the failure to bring justice while claiming the right to citizenship. Does the repetition of history after a century teach us any lessons? How has the response to the Rohingya Crisis helped the stateless minority community?
Who are the Rohingya Muslims?
As stateless people are ousted from their countries because of wars, they can no longer build an identity of their own since their idea of nation no longer exists, and while “not all refugees are stateless and not all stateless people are refugees”, this can be an act of persecution, and one which makes it easier to inflict and even justify further persecution (Chickera, 2018)
The Rohingya community is a distinct Muslim ethnic minority group from the State of Rakhine in Myanmar and have been periodically persecuted for generations. Historically, the group sided with the British colonial rule that had promised to a separate Muslim state while the Myanmar government supported the Japanese government in the hope of overthrowing them in World War II. Following this Myanmar, then Burma’, formed a union government which was largely Buddhist and denied citizenship to the Rohingyas, subjecting them to systematic atrocities and discrimination over the next three decades, resulting in Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law that rendered most of the Rohingya population as “stateless”.
The rights of the Rohingya were further limited by “Protection of Race and Religion” laws that placed harsh restrictions on fundamental religious freedoms, as well as on reproductive and marital rights within Myanmar. UNHCR presumes that over 600,000 Rohingya that reside in Rakhine State are subjected to severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, and more than 100,000 Rohingya have been confined to refugee camps since 2012.
Although government officials recently announced the closure of several camps in Rakhine state — that hosted over 10,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) — Rohingya civilians continue to experience lives of enforced segregation. Civil society organizations have been vocal about this issue over the years.
The atrocities committed by Burmese security forces, including mass killings, sexual violence, and widespread arson, amount to crimes against humanity. Military and civilian officials have repeatedly denied that security forces committed abuses during the operations, claims which are contradicted by extensive evidence and witness accounts.” (Human Rights Watch, 2018)
The failure to recognize “statelessness” has played a role in premature discussions and agreements between Myanmar, other neighboring countries and on a global level. The United Nations around the repatriation of the Rohingya from the repeated influxes has created havoc in the lives of these displaced people. Much of the Rohingya community’s plights can be compared to the sufferings endured by the “stateless people” in Europe between the times of WWI and WWII as described by Hannah Arendt in her paper “Decline of Nation State and End of Right of Man. Arendt discusses this period in terms of what she calls `the decline of the nation-state
The end of World War I introduced many nation states in Europe, which exposed the greater balance between `nation’ and `State’. In its social form, it was the State that defined the nation – not by ethnicity, language, culture, religion, history, destiny, etc., but by the virtue of “common citizenship” in a shared political community. The commonality of language or religion or blood — which are the true basis of ethnicity are defined by the state.
This shift in the character of the nation state was marked both by a proliferation of wars between one nation and another and by the internal division of political communities into four distinct elements:
i) State peoples: those nationalities which were granted by their own states;
ii) Equal partners: those nationalities (like the Slovaks in Czechoslovakia or the Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia) who were meant to be equal in government but were not;
iii) Minorities: those nationalities, sometimes officially recognised by Treaties, to whom states were not conceded (like the Jews and Armenians); and, finally,
iv) Stateless peoples: those who had no governments to represent them and, therefore, lived outside the law. According to Arendt, there were more than 10 million displaced people in 1930. (Fine, unknown).
Both periods (WWI and the most recent incident in 2017) are close to a century apart. And while similar in the characteristics of having a number of displaced minorities, on one hand, Arendt describes the breaking of countries into smaller nation states that led those displaced people in a search of inclusion and identity; on the other, the Rohingya minority were forced to flee their existing sovereign land. The distinction shows the grave issue of statelessness forced upon minorities.
Statelessness, Citizenship and Human Rights
“Everyone became convinced that true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights.” (Arendt)
The underlying reason for statelessness across centuries has been colonialism. Much can be observed over the few battles and disputes across borders claiming for independence and where one belongs and comprehending identity through the sovereign. Arendt identified statelessness with the refugee question or the “existence of ever-growing new people […] who live outside the pale of law.” She explained how these new stateless people (after the war) were persecuted “because of what they unchangeably were – born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government.” Arendt also exclaims about how during the rise of imperialism, when the colonial bureaucrat could rule, they were allowed to rule even over those who did not belong to the nation, as it already occurred during a state of emergency. These displaced people, without any rights were treated as less than human, forced to live under circumstances of “absolute lawlessness.”
Even if they were fed, clothed and housed by some public or private agency, their lives were being prolonged by charity, not rights. No law existed that could have forced the nations of the world to feed or house them. ( Jones, 2018)
Statelessness and minority people were visible evidence for national independence. As Arendt remarks, the right of a nation to have its own state was the presupposition of human rights. She emphasized how far the enlightenment idea of human rights was exposed by the emergence of the modern recluse or an outsider. The ideal concept of human rights experienced universal equality, emancipation from dependency, protection from the despotism of the state, and the inalienable dignity of each individual that no power could deny.
However, the changing times saw human rights becoming the property of nation‐states, and membership of which was the real prerequisite and normative structure of the right to have rights. Being stateless denies the right to have any such prerogatives. If the right to have rights cannot be entrusted to the nation state, it must be guaranteed by humanity itself. But how would this be possible? (Fine, unknown).
Statelessness and suppression of rights in the European conflict and Rohingya crisis and the ripping of rights shows the distinction of rules – for citizens and non-citizens. In the Rohingya Muslim case, the community took action and revolted against the military and government of Myanmar repeatedly. Their citizenship has been contested as they are outside both the political community and sovereignty of Myanmar and Bangladesh. If we apply Arendt”s interpretation, they are not only left unprotected by both governments but also in a situation of the “loss of all rights” because for human rights protection, citizenship is the prime guarantor.
In the most recent attacks, according to the New York Times,
The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the militant group fighting for Rohingya rights that attacked police posts in Rakhine State, western Myanmar, in the fall of 2016 and the summer of 2017 — precipitating violent expulsions, mass flights and, human rights groups say, crimes against humanity — has reorganized in the camps at Cox’s Bazar.
They have additionally been ordered to accept the National Verification Card (NVC) — which does not provide citizenship — or leave Myanmar.
Right to Protect, or R2P, has become a common terminology for the United Nations. It received unanimous recognition after being adopted in the UN World Summit (2005) and further reiterating in the UN Security Council (2006).
1. the state’s responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crime, ethnic cleansing and crime against humanity: Even though these rules explicitly explain that crime against humanity is punishable, many of the counties have refused to follow the signed doctrine.
2. The international community’s responsibility to help states build the capacity to protect their populations:
Some scholars argue that this is because almost all the states in Southeast Asia, in one way or another, have internal problems that affect their people in relation to the state, such as human rights violations, internal conflicts or long-sustained violence, and, thus, they avoid addressing any internal problem of other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members (Nishikawa, 2019). In such a state only the voiceless lose. These sidelined secret agreements have been problematic in many ways.
3. and, should states fail in their responsibilities, there is the possibility of the international community acting to aid the people at critical risk both through peaceful means and through collective enforcement measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But only as a last resort.
Being stateless has made the Rohingya population vulnerable. When Rohingya, “the boat people”, fled from brutality in 2017, they tried entering Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, but found closed borders. Bangladesh has been commended for its actions to welcome and accommodate them. And, in India over 40,000 Rohingya communities are hiding in various cities in the fear of being either persecuted or being asked to be moved out. In the midst of this, 2019 saw a mass uprising against Muslims in those countries, what has put these refugees, yet again, in extremely dangerous circumstances.
In a contested setting such as this, R2P cannot provide a suitable framework to help the Rohingya due to the inherent limits on its ability to protect critically affected populations in states that are in the process of nation-building and state-building with a distinctive history of nationalism, democracy and citizenship (Nishikawa, 2019).
UN Declaration and failed Treaties
Since the start of the 1900, Treaties have been a common form of building a truce between States over centuries. However, much has been achieved with the integration of the Treaties and Peace Agreements, and the rights of displaced people are yet to get a concrete understanding. Should R2P continue, and should military occupation take precedence?
Human rights, in Arendt’s view, “must be understood as human institutions kept alive through our collective power.” She says, “we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights”. In today’s context, the institutions that stand behind human rights and guarantee their equality and continued participation are the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR), a pandora of internationally accepted human rights treaties and conventions, and the International Criminal Court, and the network of national human rights institutions—are far stronger today than they were, if they existed at all, during Arendt’s life. However, the framing of these organizations makes them too weak to prevent, defend or suppress any violations of human rights committed by states. Furthering the thought, should we follow Arendt’s thinking, in order to strengthen the global human rights framework and make it more powerful and effective, we must insatiate the power to ordinary people and spread the notion of the real definition of human rights. The rise of civil society and the voices from the international community are examples of these.
In the case of Rohingyas’; the tedious and time-consuming battle has just started while subjecting the group to atrocities of all kinds. One the one hand, the bureaucratic misdemeanor was evident when Myanmar denied access to the UN Special Rapporteur on multiple occasions to analyze the situation of human rights. However, after much struggle, the UN’s report was rejected by the government. On the other, Myanmar had rejected UN’s intervention in 2011 quoting “systemic failure” within the UN system while dealing with the government.
In November 2019, the ICC officially opened an investigation into the forcible deportation of Rohingya from Myanmar and other related crimes, where one or more elements occurred in the territory of Bangladesh. Additionally, the Gambian government filed a lawsuit against Myanmar for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). At a court hearing on provisional measures in December, a delegation led by Aung San Suu Kyi rejected accusations that the country had breached its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
In Bangladesh’s support, the country has taken in many of the refugees and built refugee camps in the country. They instigated a voluntary return program where the refugees are free to go back while maintaining the stance that Myanmar will create conditions that can enable safe and voluntary returns for the refugees. These high-level talks may sound viable but on the ground level brutal acts effectively persist at a great scale. The solutions are marginal and temporary and do not provide any rights to those who need it.
The Rohingya crisis, amongst others, has provided us with countless opportunities to learn from the past and create a safe haven for citizens. They have given us an opportunity for introspection, humility and responsibility. However, where is the world headed to with the geopolitics — stranded in a situation where repeated citizens are forced to prove their nationality or wait for their rights to be rendered. Have we learned any lessons from the past?
In Arendt’s ideology, even as a group, the Rohingyas are unable to foster the true meaning of human rights and understand what it means to be guaranteed citizenship. The Rohingya have no state which can support them with their basic rights.
Tejaswini Vavilala 