1.

1 INTRODUCTION

This paper determines the conflict of Rohingya whether it was ethnic cleansing or genocide

according to International Law. Rohingya are an ethnic group which is majority of whom are

Muslim who have lived for centuries in the Majority Buddhist Myanmar. Currently, there are about

1.1 million Rohingya who live in the Southeast Asian country(Aljazeera,2017).

The conflict turn into violent in 2012, where there is a lashes between the Rohingya and

Buddhist nationalists led to scores of deaths, forcing tens of thousands of Rohingya to fled to

Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Some 200,000 people, mostly Rohingya have been

living in camps in Rakhine since the 2012 clashes(Shamil S,2017).

In October last year, Rohingya militants attacked a few security checkpoints and murdered

scores of police officers. Myanmar's security powers reacted by propelling counter-psychological

warfare operations against radicals. More than 25,000 people fled Rakhine to Bangladesh, carrying

accounts of killing, arson and rape(Syed Zain,2016). Human rights gatherings, for example,

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, said these operations involved arbitrary killings,

systematic rapes, the burning of houses and forced expulsions of locals. According to the Global

Conflict Tracker, around 617,000 estimated number of people who fled Myammar since August

2017(Joshua K, 2017).

According to international law expert Mark Kester of the University of Toronto, Genocide

is the attempt to destroy a particular group. The different between genocide and ethnic cleansing

is there are closely related term and indeed, sometimes the means by which genocide is committed

will be the same as those by which ethnic cleansing is committed. Under the UN convention to

prevent genocide, which came into force in 1951, perpetrators must be shown to have the ‘intent

1
to destroy in whole or in part’ a group based on its nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. Ethnic

cleansing is more to the removal of particular group from a particular territory, often in border-

regions of stated seeking to rid themselves of what they believed to be undesirable population.

2.0 FRAMEWORK

International law never recognizes ethnic cleansing as an independent crime. Ethnic

cleansing is the methodical constrained expulsion of ethnic or religious gatherings from a given

domain by an all the more capable ethnic gathering, regularly with the plan of making it ethnically

homogeneous. This cleaning is done through various means such as massacre, forced migration,

rape and threats. Ethnic cleansing is typically went with endeavors to expel physical and social

proof of the focused on aggregate in the domain through the annihilation of homes, social focuses,

farms, and infrastructure, and by the defilement of landmarks, burial grounds, and place of

worship.

There is an obligatory commitment expected of Myanmar to counteract and rebuff people

in charge of the wrongdoing of genocide. The state responsible through the ratification of the

agreement or customary law will not only punish those who commit a criminal offense but also to

prevent it from happening. In the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

Genocide 1948, there are obligations that state must follow. Under the Article II, in the present

Convention, genocide implies any of the accompanying demonstrations conferred with plan to

destroying, in entire or to some degree, a national, ethnical, racial or religious gathering, all things

considered: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of

the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

2
physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the

group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (Convention on the Prevention

and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, n.d.).

Since the convention, the United Nations Security Council has embraced just a single

determination prescribing Myanmar (Burma) for the UN participation. As the UN Security Council

fails to capture the breadth of situation other UN actors such as the General Assembly are well

informed but are not taking the necessary action required but rather they mainly produce reports;

and despite the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) Special Rapporteur on Myanmar having an

extended mandate since 1992 the resolutions are being neglected (Human Rights in Myanmar:

Ethnic Cleansing , 2017).

The Secretary-General urged Myanmar’s authorities to immediately end military

operations that resulted in 500,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh and called the crisis “the

world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare”

(save rohingya from genocide, n.d.). The member of the council asks Myanmar to disperse their

troops and grant freedom to Rohingya people. In February 2017, the OHCHR issued the Flash

Report on the alarming scale and severity of operations by the Myanmar security forces against

Rohingya men, women and children in Rakhine State during October 2016 (save rohingya from

genocide, n.d.).

Other than that, the community can consider doing is applying approvals to put weight on

the Myanmar government. But not much can be done through sanctions. It needs consider in

various aspects to community prevent the ethnic cleansing such as political and economic. The

only community can do to relieve the burden of the Rohingyas is to prescribes on the physical

3
guide side to give to the International Rescue Committee, and on the support side giving to Fortify

Rights.

Myanmar needs to submit this case to International Criminal Court (ICC) because they are

one of the state that sign the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

Genocide 1948. The ICC is to be viewed as a skilled international penal tribunal under the genocide

convention even in situations where the ICC practices locale on the premise of a Security Council

referral. Myanmar needs to comply with the rules set up as a country that signs the genocide

convention and will need to work with the ICC to resolve this case.

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3.0 OUTCOMES

In justification, the outcomes that we get from the cases of Rohingya's conflict are when a

state itself operates ethnic cleansing over its subjects, it is the responsibility of the international

community to intervene superseding the principle of non-intervention. The responsibility to protect

includes three particular obligations i.e. identify the causes of crisis putting the subjects at risk;

responding the crisis by taking appropriate measures which include mediation, warning, sanction,

international prosecution and in extreme cases military intervention; assisting to resolve the causes

of the catastrophe.

However, the exercise of responsibility to protect should not disregard the principle of non-

intervention of internal affairs of any sovereign state. This is why the issue of interference on

humanitarian ground has been seen as one of the most contentious and complex of all international

relations questions. The main intention of the intervention should be to stop or prevent human

suffering.

Military intervention is considered as the last resort which should only be applied if there

is reasonable apprehension that other measures would not have succeeded. Military action on

humanitarian ground should be through the Security Council of the United Nations.

All in all, international community cannot evade their responsibility to protect Rohingya.

Otherwise, they have to see what experienced in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur

and many other devastating events.

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4.0 CONCLUSION

The Rohingya crisis in Myanmar is currently generally portrayed as ethnic cleansing. In any

case, the circumstance has been advancing. What's more, now, it appears, we can never again

maintain a strategic distance from the conclusion we have all been fearing. This is a genocide.

What's more, we, in the universal group, must remember it accordingly.

Article II of United Nation's 1948 Genocide Convention describes genocide as "any of the

following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or

religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to

members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring

about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births

within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."(Azeem I. 2017).

In spite of the fact that the Rohingya situation has met most of the above criteria for being

described as a genocide under international law for a number of years now is the label has been

resisted until now because we think that genocide as one huge act of wild violence, like the machete

insanity in Rwanda and the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

All things considered, that genocide created and unfurled over a time of over 10 years. A large

portion of that period was not brought up with the slaughtering of Jews, Gypsies and the various

"sub-people." Rather, it was brought up with assembling of the classification of "sub-humans" by

state purposeful publicity. Just once the issue was made and sold to the more extensive populace

did the "final solution" end up plainly reasonable.

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