International Crisis Group Makes A Mockery Of ‘Peace’ In Burma

Francis Wade

Asia Correspondent

April 23, 2013

At a glitzy dinner tonight in New York, where the cover charge for a table can reach heady six figure sums, Burma’s President Thein Sein will be honoured with the International Crisis Group’s top peace award. Across the pond he will receive additional applause from the EU in the form of a termination of all sanctions on Burma, except for its arms embargo.

Yet away from the pomp of the ICG awards ceremony, a starkly different picture has been painted. Human Rights Watch released a report Monday that wholly implicates Burma’s government in crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in Arakan state. This isn’t the conclusion of an investigation into the former junta’s rights record, but instead something very current, and for which Thein Sein bears responsibility.

“The Burmese government and security forces are responsible for attacks on the Rohingya [last year] in which crimes against humanity were committed,” said Matthew Smith, a consultant with HRW. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of HRW, said in a statement that the government “engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya that continues today through the denial of aid and restrictions on movement”.

The emphasis of the report, which the group put together using extensive testimonies collected on the ground in Arakan state, is official complicity in the displacement of 125,000 Rohingya, and the deaths of hundreds. The intended end result of this campaign of violence, which has involved local politicians, NGOs and security forces, as well as civilians, is the removal of an entire ethnic group, either through death or displacement.

To date, the government has denied any responsibility for the two major waves of violence in June and October last year. It said in response to HRW’s accusations of complicity by security forces that the claims were “unfounded and not true information … [security forces] took security measures day and night without taking sides and without discrimination of race and religion”.

Eyewitnesses in Arakan state tell otherwise – police, army and the NaSaKa border security group were directly involved in razing houses and escorting violent mobs of Arakanese into Rohingya areas. In Yan Thei village in Mrauk U, police “assisted the killings by disarming the Rohingya of their sticks and other rudimentary weapons they carried to defend themselves,” HRW said. It also details an incident in which a government truck dumped 18 Rohingya bodies outside a Rohingya camp, a practice that is consistent with the campaign of intimidation that is often an ingredient in ethnic cleansing.

Over in Meiktila in central Burma, where entire Muslim quarters were razed by Buddhist mobs last month, footage has just emerged that shows police watching as Muslim-owned properties are destroyed.

In this context then, one struggles to fathom how ICG could honour Burma’s president. To be sure, Thein Sein has overseen positive developments in several spheres, such as media and opposition political participation. Yet this award is about peace, an area in which he has failed disastrously. “International Crisis Group’s goal is as ambitious as it is vital: to mobilise leaders around the globe to prevent and end deadly conflict,” the statement introducing the award says.

But since Thein Sein came to office, civil war has broken out in Kachin state, fierce rioting has erupted in Arakan state, and several waves of deadly anti-Muslim violence have rocked central Burma, while a huge increase in internal displacement of civilians has occurred, as has unprecedented refugee flows from western Burma to other Southeast Asian countries. The list goes on. He has demonstrably failed to respond to evidence that prominent parliamentarians, such as Dr. Aye Maung from the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, have called for the removal of the Rohingya; indeed last year Thein Sein asked the UN to resettle all 800,000 Rohingya. In ICG’s own words, however, the man should be applauded for his “efforts to bring us closer to a world free of conflict”.

The EU’s decision to drop sanctions is also highly contentious, and for similar reasons, yet it has maintained an arms embargo precisely because of substantial ongoing concerns about the military, which has shown no sign that it intends to mend its ways. ICG, which pins the award to positive developments towards an end to armed conflict, appears to refute those concerns.

The award is especially galling for Burma because ICG has backed a war crimes investigation into the Sri Lankan conflict. ICG is undoubtedly aware of what has occurred in Burma in the two years since Thein Sein became president – it follows the developments there closely, but is evidently guilty of sidelining the negatives and myopically homing in on the positives, despite the scales currently tipping in favour of the former.

It’s hard to tell why exactly they’ve chosen such a controversial position on Burma. Burmese academic Maung Zarni has some very useful thoughts here, while past observers have talked of groups like ICG wanting to become part of a “pacted transition” in Burma, with a pro-trade and aid stance that ultimately reaps significant economic benefits for stakeholders, ICG included. This commentary accuses them of being “democracy manipulators” headed by men and women with key ties to the US elite who would have considerable personal interests in a Burma that is open to business. Either way, one would be wise to take the award with more than a pinch of salt – it’s woefully misguided, and carries the potential to induce a dangerous naivety among those not versed in the major pitfalls of this transition.