Rohingya 05 GENOCIDE DAY Never Again is Happening Again Against Rohingya in Arakan BY NURUL ISLAM It is now almost 76 years since the United Nations passed the genocide Convention in 1948. If there was one single idea behind the convention, it was encapsulated in two words – Never Again, which expressed many people’s reaction to the Holocaust. Yet today genocide is happening again and again due to failure of the international community to prevent and to stop it. On 11 December 1946 the U.N. General Assembly passed unanimously Resolution 96(1), which identified genocide as ‘a crime under international law’ and called on Member States both to ‘enact the necessary legislation for the prevention and punishment of the crime’ and to ‘cooperate speedily to prevent and punish it’. Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, clearly defines genocide as the act of destroying in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group --such acts are held to include: killing, seriously injuring or causing mental harm to members of such groups, inflicting upon such groups adverse living conditions so that physical destruction of the group is threatened, deliberate attempts to prevent members of the groups from having children, and forcibly transferring children from one group to another. The Rohingya genocide is a series of ongoing persecutions and killings of the Muslim Rohingya people by the Myanmar military, its partners and accomplices with intent to destroy this ethnic Muslim community on grounds of ethnicity and religion. They are experiencing almost all definitions of the genocide mentioned in Article II of the Convention. The destruction of Rohingya people in Myanmar began decades ago, particularly when dictator General Ne Win’s takeover of the government in 1962. He was highly suspicious of non-Buddhists and Muslims, specifically the Muslim Rohingya were made main targets. Ne Win and his cronies have had designed a series of armed operations to victimize and exterminate Rohingya. The popular slogan in the country is “to be a Burmese is to be a Buddhist”. In Arakan, the Rakhine ultranationalists have been harping on the tune of “Arakan is for Rakhine only, Bengali or Rohingya have nothing to do in Arakan.” The military dictatorships have put the two communities of Rakhine and Rohingya at loggerheads and divided them on racial and religious lines. Despite boomerang to them, the Rakhine are instrumental in the ‘Rohingya annihilation’ plan of the military junta. In 1979, despite his own mixed BurmanChinese heritage, Ne Win stated: Today you can see that even people of pure blood are being disloyal to the race and country but are loyal to others. If people of pure blood act this way, we must carefully watch people of mixed blood. Some people are of pure blood, pure Burmese heritage and descendants of genuine citizens. Karen, Kachin and so forth, are of genuine pure blood. But we must consider whether this people are completely our race, our Burmese people. In 1982, Ne Win adopted his “Burma Citizenship Law”, redefined citizenship and declared Rohingya as nonnationals. “Some observers have suggested that this law was specifically designed effectively to deny Rohingyas the right to nationality.” The 1982 law violates several fundamental principals of international law standards, offends the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and leaves Rohingyas exposed to no legal protection of their rights. It serves as an oppressive legal tool particularly against Rohingya people rendering them stateless in their own country.