LETTER | The Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy (Centhra) supports the inalienable right of Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic minority group to self-identify as Rohingya.
We acknowledge the ethnic group’s verifiable, pre-colonial presence, history, identity and culture in Northern Arakan, now called Rakhine State in western Myanmar;
Together with the world’s leading scholar on famines, Amartya Sen and the veteran anti-apartheid campaigner Desmond Tutu, Centhra fully recognises Myanmar’s decades-long persecution of Rohingya as genocide.
This is a common finding of four-independent studies published by Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Myanmar in September 2017, the Yale Law School Human Rights Clinic in October 2015, Queen Mary University Law School’s International State Crimes Initiative in October 2015, and the Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal of the University of Washington School of Law in 2014.
Centhra unequivocally supports the calls for international accountability and justice made by senior most UN human rights officials, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Professor Yanghee Lee and ICC prosecutor and president of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I regarding Myanmar’s crimes against humanity in the form of systematic and pre-planned and violent deportation of about 800,000 Rohingya women, men, children and elderly people from their original homeland, since October 2016, across Myanmar’s western borders on to the soil of neighbouring Bangladesh;
Centhra declares August 25 as the Rohingya Remembrance Day.
On that fateful day in 2017, the combined Myanmar Armed Forces – Navy, Air Force and Army – launched large-scale premeditated attacks against the substantial segment of the Rohingya population in the northernmost part of Rakhine State, having used the invented pretext that the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa) – a year-old old group of largely illiterate, barefooted young Rohingya village men armed with farm tools such as machetes, spears and a few home-made grenades – had launched (coordinated) “attacks on 30 police outposts.”
This was the Myanmar government’s official story, which has never been independently verified by any credible research, media or UN agency.
Finally, Centhra supports the existential needs of several million Rohingyas violently deported by Myanmar government in periodic waves of exodus since 1978 to secure protected return to their birthplace and ancestral homeland in Northern Rakhine.
This will require international protection, with or without the UN Security Council consensus – until such a time as Myanmar is ready to accept them as full and equal citizens, with basic human and minority rights, the official status which Rohingya had enjoyed upon independence from Britain well into the late 1970s.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
