U.S. Position in Rohingya Crisis Echoes Past Inaction

In the words of German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt, “the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” In other words, bystanders perpetuate wrongdoing. On an interpersonal scale, most people agree that bystanders have a responsibility to intervene. But when you put the concept of responsibility in a global context, it complicates things, to say the least, especially concerning one of the worst evils of all: genocide.

In 1994, the Clinton Administration instructed its spokesmen not to characterize the daily massacres in Rwanda as “genocide” even though senior officials believed that was precisely what was occurring. The administration wanted to avoid inciting public pressure to stop the mass killings. For context, the U.S. had just pulled American troops out of a disastrous U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia – later made infamous in the book Black Hawk Down– the year before. In response, the U.S. vowed never to return to a conflict it couldn’t understand between tribes it wasn’t familiar with, and in a country where there were no American interests.

As a result, the U.S. failed to act during the slaughter of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda despite receiving intelligence about the bloody conflict in real-time. Embassies in Kigali published daily death tolls; for 100 days, an average of 8,000 people were murdered per day—all while the U.S. turned a blind eye. The American government received a flood of reports detailing victims being maimed by the militia and Hutu gangs with rifles searching out children hiding in churches and school buildings. In total, the genocidaires wiped out 70 percent of Rwanda’s Tutsi population and raped half a million women. While the U.S. condemned the scale and brutality of the massacre, the government refused to call it “genocide” to avoid public pressure to intervene and stop the killings forcefully. In fact, no other country intervened either; the entire international community fell victim to a “bystander mentality.”

When the world came out of its stupor, the U.S. released a 1994 memo that repudiated claims of U.S. responsibility in the Rwandan genocide. However, four years later, U.S. President Bill Clinton expressed regret for not acting quickly enough or immediately calling the crimes “genocide” during a visit to Rwanda. He later admitted the U.S. alone could have saved more than 260,000 lives in Rwanda through military intervention. His overdue apologies fail to conceal that U.S. inaction was not only a passive moral failure of our state, but a global evil as defined by Arendt.

More than twenty-five years after the Rwandan genocide, the U.S.’ current response—or lack thereof—to the state-sanctioned violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar is chillingly similar. According to a much anticipated 2018 report by the U.S. State Department, “the recent violence in northern Rakhine State was extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorizing the population and driving out the Rohingya residents.” It also details the systematic rape and targeting of women and children. However, the acknowledgment of these atrocities as “genocide” was glaringly absent from the report. The probe even stopped short of calling the events “crimes against humanity,” which would meet the legal standard allowing the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute the perpetrators of this ethnic cleansing.

The U.S. government’s reluctance to condemn the crisis in Myanmar as “genocide” is not indicative of diplomatic prudence, but of the same willful ignorance it displayed during the massacre in Rwanda. Despite Myanmar’s recent democratization, the U.S. does not have a strong vested interest in the South Asian nation and, for that reason, is not likely to intervene. Furthermore, with the U.S. still reeling from its involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government is hesitant to take forceful political or military action in a foreign nation.

The international community is far from unaware of the brutalities inflicted on the Rohingya people; a recent report by the U.N. Human Rights Council calls for top military officials in Myanmar’s army to face charges of genocide, and the ICC chief prosecutor opened an investigation into the massacre. The Rohingya crisis has even led to Nobel Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kye’s fall from grace following her defence of the regime against accusations of genocide. However, most world leaders have once again chosen to follow the U.S.’ lead in refusing to label the events in Myanmar as “genocide.”

Why does the term “genocide” carry such importance? Because this label may invoke politically charged images of the Holocaust, it has the power to inflame public cries for action the current administration is unwilling to take. This distinction is also an important legal one that governs if and how the ICC may act to prosecute the perpetrators of mass ethnic-based violence.

Since the crackdown began in 2015, the Rohingya have become the poster child of genocide; an estimated 43,000 Rohingya have perished and 700,000 have become stateless fleeing persecution at the hands of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority government. These asylum-seekers are trapped in a tangle of bureaucracy, indifference, and lack of political will. The Rohingya have been called “the most persecuted people in the world,” and yet the U.S. has stalled action for five years—twenty times as long as the Rwandan genocide. This could be interpreted as the normalization of a humanitarian crisis, and is arguably the moral failure of the United States.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt writes that in order to prevent evil, we must “call a spade a spade.” In other words, we cannot ignore the atrocities of the world in an attempt to evade responsibility for them. Instead, we must call out evil with utter conviction. The U.S. knew the extent of the Rwandan genocide before, and during the mass violence but refused to act at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. Once again, the U.S. faces uncertainty amid a deliberate and widespread extermination of an ethnic group halfway across the world. The United States is morally obligated to publicly condemn the persecution of the Rohingya as “genocide.” More than that, it must live up to its self-promotion as a global beacon of liberty and human rights and take decisive action to avoid repeating history.