In all genocides, you will find EXTERNAL ACTORS - states, corporations/business organizations, individuals (officials from other states, for instance, diplomats, ex-officials, academics, spiritual, religious, and perpetrating community leaders).
Myanmar genocide -- which my researcher colleague and wife Natalie and I characterized as "the slow-burning genocide", because of its excruciatingly protracted nature of persecution -- is no exception - UN officials, western and Asian diplomats, legal scholars, lawyers, academics, thinktank writers, and advisers, business executives, journalists, etc. - have played various complicit and proactive roles, serving as Bystanders, Enablers, Whitewashers, Appeasers, Collaborators, Cheerleaders, Financers, etc.
Many scholars who specialize in Myanmar affairs carefully avoid being entangled themselves in the activist cries against the atrocities against the country's most vulnerable and most peaceful population of Rohingya committed in the name of, falsely, Buddhism, national security, and illegal immigration.
From former senior diplomats from the Philippines and Japan to heads of state and other ranking politicians from Myanmar's immediate neighborhoods of Singapore, Thailand, India, Cambodia, to EU, UK, US ambassadors, ex and serving, are complicit, with varying degrees of culpability, in Myanmar genocide. I won't name names here because there are too many - to keep track of these crime-enablers and/or -whitewashers.
I remember how extremely visceral I had felt in Berlin 2 years ago when a brand new Burma desk officer inside the building of the German Federal Foreign Affairs Ministry in Berlin who dismissed my observation that the potency of Burmese racism was no less than Nazis' whipped up loathing of the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. Holding this typical rotating diplomatic assignment, the German diplomat knew next to nothing about my country's affairs, let alone being in a position to assess the depth of racism. My blood boiled and I felt this incredible disgust in my bones.
Genocides are crimes perpetrated against a weak and vulnerable target group, primarily by highly racialized or ethnicized political states (such as Myanmar), with popular support of the majoritarian ethnicized CIVIL SOCIETY, with the intent to destroy the target group, IN WHOLE or IN PART.
Genocidal methods are varied and numerous, beyond what is encoded and defined in the Genocide Convention.
Forced migration (forced out-migration or "deportation" of members of the target group, not because they commit any crime against the state or the society at large) but because they exist as who they say they are - for instance, Rohingya. That is because they belong to the group called Rohingyas. Their group membership/ identity is the prime reason for the state-directed assault against their community.
This - the INTENT (to commit genocide) - is the subject of my next podcast and Facebook LIVE with two world-renowned on 25 January.
We have been deeply troubled by Myanmar's international lawyer William Schabas' nonsensical - or more disingenuous - a legal argument which he mounted at the ICJ during the public hearings of The Gambia vs Myanmar: the accusers must establish one and only interpretation - the intent to destroy the targeted "protected group" under the Genocide Convention - if a crime is to be deemed, juridically, genocide. In other words, the intent behind criminal deeds must absolutely be SINGULAR. Sadly, this kind of stupidity or dishonesty pervades many legalistic circles, when experts and scholars split hair, while the world burns and corpses pile up.
Here is an old museum captain that caught my attention during a visit to "the concentration camp in the 'Reich capital' at Publications - Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen (sachsenhausen-sbg.de), the SS's purpose-built concentration camp.
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