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Seeking Response
Strategic Vision vol. 8, no. 42 (June, 2019)
National interests preclude Beijing from getting involved in Rohingya crisis
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Hon-min Yau
Emergency food, drinking water and shelters are provided to help people displaced in western Burma’s Rakhine State.
photo: UK Department for International Development
Since 2016 the political and military suppression by the Myanmar government of the Rohingya people has come to the attention of the international community. Due to complex historical and cultural entanglements, this Muslim minority group has been constantly living in a hostile environment surrounded by other, unfriendly ethnic groups. In 2017, the Myanmar Army, known as the Tatmadaw, conducted a brutal crackdown in response to armed resistance on the part of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the Arakan Army. After this violence, a large number of Rohingya people began to seek sanctuary in neighboring countries, especially Bangladesh. As indicated by the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, by early 2019 it was estimated that there were about 745,000 Rohingya refugees, mostly children, who had fled to Bangladesh’s coastal city of Cox’s Bazar. As a result of this development, the Bangladesh government has continuously been seeking a resolution to ease this migration crisis.
On 25 June, 2019, the Bangladesh Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen pleaded for China’s support in convincing Myanmar to fulfill its commitment to repatriate the Rohingya refugees now living within the territory of Bangladesh. Although a repatriation deal was signed between Myanmar and Bangladesh in early 2018, there has been no concrete progress in returning these refugees. In early July, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where she urged leaders to support Bangladesh in its efforts to return Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. As China’s outsized importance in this crisis seems to stand out given recent developments, this article seeks to examine China’s significance in resolving this humanitarian crisis.
A closed mosque in Sittwe. Few traces of traces of the Muslim community remain, whereas the Rohingya once made up 40 percent of the population here.
photo: mohigan
The Rohingya are a group of Muslim minorities, not recognized by Myanmar, who live in the western part of that country, mostly in Rakhine State. Before 1989, this place was called Arakan, and Rohingya were widely known as the Arakanese. Myanmar is a country containing 135 official “national ethnic races,” including the Shan, Kachin, Chin, and other minorities. The Bamar ethnic majority accounts for 68 percent of the total population: By religion, 88 percent of the population is Buddhist, 6 percent Christian, and 4 percent Muslim. Anger and hatred directed towards the Rohingya people cannot be attributed to religious differences alone, as there are other Muslim minorities.
Colonial relic
The non-Western narrative within Myanmar paints this group of people as a relic of the colonial power during World War II, as they were mercenaries from current-day Bangladesh that the British employed to combat Japanese troops and the pro-Japan independence forces in British Burma. The most notorious incident of a bloody clash was in 1942, when members of this Muslim group clashed with the local Buddhist community, which resulted in 100,000 casualties. Although the exact death toll is disputable, the resentment towards the Rohingya continued after the independence of Burma in 1948. At the beginning of this new country, the first citizenship law in 1948 offered Rohingya minimal rights, but a new citizenship law enacted in 1982 completely stripped the Rohingya not just of citizenship, but of their identity. As such, the Rohingya are treated as refugees from Bangladesh within Myanmar. This social and legal discrimination limits the Rohingya’s access to basic schooling and health services and inhibits their livelihood and freedom of movement.
Why does Bangladesh see China as a possible facilitator in resolving the current humanitarian crisis? China’s role can be viewed from both security and economic angles. From the security perspective, Myanmar’s strategic location offers a land bridge for China to access the Indian Ocean, and Myanmar is also a neighbor sharing a 2,204 kilometer border with China. For this reason, China has invested huge amounts of money in strengthening its military cooperation with Myanmar. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute indicates that 90 percent of Myanmar’s military vehicles are supplied by the PRC. Beijing also provides military equipment in the form of missiles, radar, naval vessels, and aircraft. Hence, as Myanmar’s largest neighbor and closest security partner, China has always been very supportive in backing Myanmar’s position regarding its handling of the Rohingya Crisis: When the UN called Myanmar’s actions “ethnic cleansing” in September 2018, China supported Myanmar’s officials, who labeled the incident an act of counter-insurgency.
In November 2018, Myanmar received a sharp US rebuke when Vice President Mike Pence criticized the Rohingya’s persecution at the hands of their own government. In contrast, PRC Premier Li Keqiang
presented a clear stance to support, “Myanmar’s efforts in maintaining its domestic stability.” Clearly, it is in China’s interests to continue to block any international interventions that would allow Western-led action to take place in its doorstep.
From an economic perspective, it is noteworthy that Myanmar has become part of China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI), and economic cooperation between the two countries is very strong. China is now involved in Myanmar’s rail, road, telecommunications, hydro-power, and airport development. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China contributed to Myanmar’s GDP growth to the tune of 5.5 percent in 2012, and 6.5 percent in 2013. Also, the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) of the BRI will allow China’s Yunnan province to connect the Indian Ocean through two major ports, Yangon in the south and Kyaukpyu in the west of Myanmar. Tellingly, Kyaukpyu is located in Rakhine State where the Rohingya people reside, and has received massive Chinese investments for the construction of oil-gas pipelines and railroad links to China. In November 2018, a contract was renewed with China’s state-owned investment company, CITIC group, to develop Kyaukpyu as a Special Economic Zone. China’s political support to Myanmar supports its economic interests.
National leaders meet in Beijing for the second annual Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in April, 2019.
photo: Kremlin.ru
Cooperative partnership
Beijing has prioritized its interests over the Rohingya’s, and Myanmar is returning the favor. In April 2019, when the commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, visited China, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece Xinhua reported that Xi Jinping sees “China-Myanmar military cooperation as an important part of the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries.”
Min Aung Hlaing also stated that Myanmar would continue to back the BRI in response to China’s international support. Later that month, the de facto leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, met with Xi Jinping and signed multiple agreements with China in the Second Belt and Road Forum. China has exploited this opportunity to establish a closer relationship with Myanmar, which is beleaguered by Western countries.
Even if China and Myanmar are not putting the Rohingya Crisis at the forefront, what are the UN’s actions in the matter? In response to this humanitarian crisis, the UN established an independent factfinding mission in March 2017 to investigate alleged human right abuses by Myanmar. However, lack of support and cooperation from the Myanmar government created difficulty to access the needed information on-site. In September 2018, the UN fact-finding mission issued a 440-page report which concluded that Myanmar’s military had conducted multiple crimes, including rape and sexual violence, as part of a deliberate strategy to intimidate, terrorize, or punish the civilian population, and as a tactic of war. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) still failed to act in any way to mitigate the ongoing humanitarian crisis: as reported in December 2018 by Reuters, China, along with Russia, blocked another British-drafted resolution demanding the return of refugees and accountability for the criminal incidents.
As the Rohingya crisis continues under-resourced Bangladesh is severely strained by the huge influx of refugees. This has multiple implications: First, the country’s per capita GDP in June 2019 was US$1,827, up from US$1,675 a year earlier, and there are 6 million people still living in extreme poverty. The immediate impact for Bangladesh is the unbearable financial burden, and its citizens are growing impatient with the already low domestic living standards. Second, as Bangladesh is not wealthy enough to offer underprivileged Rohingya people economic opportunities, it can be expected that this flow of migrants could move to other destinations, and destabilize the already frail regional economic stability amid the uncertainties wrought by the Sino-US Trade War.
Finally, while Myanmar continues to conduct its indiscriminate “clearance operation” on the Rohingya populace, extreme Islamist movements can emerge from such an environment. In 2017, Al Qaeda already issued a declaration urging global Muslims to mount an armed rebellion in support of the Rohingya people. Along with the migrations of Rohingya to countries other than Bangladesh, this combination potentially creates the perfect conditions to facilitate the radicalization of a new wave of Islamic extremists in Asia.
Mrauk U town in northern Rakhine State. From 1430 until 1785, it was the capital of the Mrauk U Kingdom, the most powerful Rakhine kingdom.
photo: Go-Myanmar.com
Members of the Myanmar Police Force patrolling in Maungdaw, a town in Rakhine State in the western part of Burma, in September 2017.
photo: VOA
Human rights violations
In June 2018, it was reported by The New York Times that the Myanmar government had closed the Internet connection to the Rohingya’s hometown in Myanmar, Rakhine State. Many Western analysts saw this decision as either a precursor to, or a cover-up of, massive human rights violations. Without concrete improvement in security conditions and the removal of the social and political discrimination practices in Myanmar, the Rohingya people fleeing overseas will not be willing to return to their homes in the near future. The special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Professor Yanghee Lee, cited the UN Security Council itself as the primary roadblock to any progress. Speaking in a 27 June, 2019, interview with Radio Free Asia, she pointed out that “China is backing the Myanmar government [by] objecting to a Security Council resolution for referral to the ICC [International Criminal Court]. China and Russia often work together in this kind of situation, which I think is shameful, so that the Security Council cannot move beyond this.”
To stop the vicious cycle and end the Rohingya crisis, the international community needs to encourage China to change its existing policy. However, the problem is that the international system has long been considered as a state of anarchy, and there is no central authority to monopolize legal violence or even to justify right from wrong. Any state, including China, will act in its own interests. While very few countries possess similar material capacities of military and economic power like China, how can China be compelled to act out of concern for the Rohingya’s predicament?
It is necessary to create a powerful international discourse regarding China’s stance on the Rohingya people. The appropriateness of a State’s policy is not merely decided by its interests but also acted upon by international norms. International norms are determined by social interaction among states, and they have no fixed truth, like domestic law, since there is no concrete political process to legitimate them.
Infrangible sovereignty
International norms are legitimated as truth only through discourses created by power exercised by international actors, including both government and non-government bodies. For example, the sovereignty of the State used to be infrangible but has now been redefined by international human right laws, just as whale hunting used to be legally justified as States’ right to harvest natural resources but is now interpreted as an act of endangering natural species. People attribute this new “regime of truth,” in Foucauldian terminology of the international relations, to the successful discourses of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International and the International Whaling Commission, which use their discursive powers to convert knowledge through various meanings into social reality.
While these NGOs have no material power, like military aircraft or tanks, they can still contribute to the legitimacy of international human rights law and anti-whaling campaigns. This suggests that, instead of relying on material forces, discourse can still be an enabler of change in a State’s behavior. That is to say: international criticism of China’s stance on the Rohingya Crisis has the potential to enact a change of policy.
To sum up, the challenge lying ahead for the Rohingya Crisis is to encourage China to value humanitarian concerns over its own geostrategic interests, with respect to the conditions of the Rohingya people. This task is not an easy one, and cannot merely rely on the efforts of the Rohingya people nor the Bangladesh government alone; it requires collective investments from both State and non-State actors to focus global attention and spur continuous discussion of the Rohingya situation.
The United Nations Security Council meets. A proposed UN statement of concern over the tense situation in Myanmar was blocked by China in March 2017.
photo: US State Department
Dr. (Colonel) Hon-min Yau is an assistant professor in the National Defense University. He can be reached for comment at cf22517855@gmail.com
