SNA (Sydney) — A year and a half after the brutal military coup, responses to the crisis in Myanmar remain muted, including towards the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people.

The Rohingya are a Muslim community that has lived in Myanmar’s Rakhine State for generations. They became officially stateless under the Burmese Citizenship Law of 1982, signaling the fact that Rohingya have long been targets of discrimination for the country’s Buddhist majority.

In 2015, Myanmar held national elections in which Rohingya were forbidden to run for office or even to vote.

The National League for Democracy won the 2015 elections, and Aung San Suu Kyi became state counsellor, effectively the head of state.

Even under the democratically-elected government, however, harsh repression amounting to genocide continued, carried out primarily by the military. Suu Kyi made little or no effort to rein in this violence in spite of widespread international condemnation. Indeed, it wasn’t until two years after she came to power that Suu Kyi made her first public statements about the genocide: she refused to blame the army; made vague promises about holding “those responsible” accountable; and merely insisted that people should not “quarrel” in Rakhine state.

This so-called “quarrel” referred to the Myanmar military’s harsh response to a series of attacks on its outposts by a small group of Rohingya in 2016-2017. The military’s answer was to murder thousands of civilians, rape women and girls, and destroy villages. It is estimated that up to 9,000 Rohingya were slaughtered outright, and at least 700,000 people fled to neighboring Bangladesh.

International responses to the outbreak of the genocide were weak. Generalized Islamophobia is widely seen as a significant factor why many nations were largely unmoved, and another factor may have been Suu Kyi’s personal reputation as a democratic hero.

There are also strategic factors that have protected Myanmar from accountability.

In 2018, for example, it signed an agreement to establish the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Additionally, since at least 2020, Russia and India have operated gas exploration and extraction projects in Myanmar, many of these in Rakhine state itself.

Nevertheless, some punitive actions were imposed in this period. The United States implemented sanctions on some senior-level military generals, police commanders, and army units found to have been involved in ethnic cleansing. But these efforts were insufficient to halt the genocide.

According to a Human Rights Watch report issued last year, “Myanmar has made no significant progress in resolving the crisis, or providing accountability and justice for the victims.” In fact, the report said, the government has maintained open-air detention camps since 2012 at which at least 130,000 Rohingya have been confined.

The Rohingya genocide is believed to be continuing under the military regime that seized power in February last year, although there are few opportunities for independent observers to confirm the facts.

Indeed, international media attention to the plight of the Rohingya appears to have been eclipsed by stories about the country’s pro-democracy opposition.

For example, when the military regime announced in June that it had executed four pro-democracy activists on charges of aiding “terror acts,” international outrage followed. A number of Western nations, including Japan and South Korea, issued a joint statement describing the executions as “reprehensible acts of violence that further exemplify the regime’s disregard for human rights and the rule of law.”

While these executions briefly brought international focus back to the military regime, it remains the case that the main priorities lay elsewhere.

This is demonstrated by the fact that, in the last five years, the amount of humanitarian aid donated by the United States to the Rohingya crisis reached approximately US$1.7 billion, which compares to roughly US$54 billion in assistance (including US$31 billion in humanitarian aid) to Ukraine in the five months since the Russian invasion, according to information from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act.

The greater focus on Ukraine is likely driven in part by the fact that this conflict is closer to US strategic concerns, and in part by underlying racism and Islamophobia.

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