Problems of the Genocide Convention of 1948: Genocide against the Rohingyas

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Peace, War, and Social Conflict Roundtable #2: Collective Violence

Abstract

This paper challenges the enormously restricted definition of the Genocide Convention of 1948. I argue that the United Nations’ “Holocaust based” legal definition of genocide must be extended by going beyond the idea that the meaning of genocide is limited to large-scale direct physical killing. The paper examines how the government of Myanmar, the military, and security forces have attempted to destroy cultural artifacts of the Rohingyas on which their identity and communal life depend. By performing a content analysis of in-depth interview data from fifty Rohingya refugees in refugee shelters in Bangladesh and reports of human rights organizations, I examine how the military and armed forces gradually but systematically stripped away the citizenship of the Rohingyas of Myanmar, destroyed their political and cultural identity and left them stateless. I explore intersection of physical, political, and cultural techniques used by the government and security forces that caused the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in the world today. Forced displacement and disappearance, forced labor, beating, rape, and travel restrictions on the Rohingya led to their starvation, health crises, death, and mass exodus. Repression caused the Rohingyas to lose community connections and caring rituals. The Myanmar government’s marriage permit policy, the two-child policy, the policy of making abortion illegal while birth control methods are unavailable and making the adoption of children by the Rohingya illegal were well orchestrated and sought to ensure political, physical, and cultural destruction of the Rohingyas. By destroying cultural artifacts, the Myanmar government annihilated the religious culture of the Rohingya. Religious restrictions on the Rohingya led to widespread symbolic violence against the Rohingya.

Author

• Afroza Anwary, Minnesota State University, Mankato