responded to these crimes against humanity by announcing an aid package and sending out a handful of Foreign Office staff on a fact-finding mission.
Yes, aid is important, but it is only politics that will stop the killing, and the UK government seems to be demonstrating a distinct lack of political will over the slaughter of the Rohingya.
We should be rallying international actors, especially China and India, both bilaterally and through the UN, to stop the slaughter and to allow unfettered humanitarian access in Rakhine state.
While we are still in the EU, we should be using our membership to build support for the banning of any sales of equipment to the Myanmar military, and calling for a UN-mandated global arms embargo to stop unscrupulous nations from profiting off these war crimes.
And we should be openly calling for a referral to the International Criminal Court of those involved in this campaign of ethnic cleansing, wherever that may lead. These steps will not, alone, end the violence, but they will help, and, at the very least, they will show the military government, the Rohingya and the world where the UK stands.
The government is also labouring under the delusion that Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s top civilian leader, will rescue the Rohingya any day now. The theory goes that putting pressure on the military government would risk snuffing out the post-2011 reforms that they allowed, ceding limited power to her democratically elected party.
This is why Britain supported, with GBP10m ($13m) in finance and political support, a census which omitted the Rohingya as a minority - an ugly and significant step to ethnic cleansing, but one which the government made as a concession for the wider reforms.
The whole point of supporting constitutional reform in Myanmar was to help reduce human rights abuses. But those have instead dramatically increased, and Aung San Suu Kyi has not used her current power to release political prisoners or change a 1982 law, which stripped the Rohingya of citizenship. Instead, she has dismissed reports of ethnic cleansing in her country as ‘fake news.’
The military government is not interested in reversing the piecemeal reforms. They know that they have won international sanctions relief and that this provides a shield to international action, allowing them to kill their own people with impunity.
Our deadly silence has proven them right.
This article was originally published as: ‘The UK government’s silence on Myanmar is shamful.’
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com