Pod Save the World - Crisis in Burma

Episode Date: September 20, 2017

Tommy talks with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof and Nexus Fund Executive Director Sally Smith about the ongoing ethnic cleansing happening right now in Burma.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. Today's episode is about the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Some people call Burma. The names are going to get used interchangeably throughout the interview. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group that practices Islam in the Rakhine state, which is one of Myanmar's poorest states. They have their own language. They have their own cultural practices. And unfortunately are the victims of some of the worst discrimination you can imagine.

This discrimination comes in a number of ways. The Rohingya are attacked and oppressed by the Buddhist majority for being Muslim. based on their religion. They were also falsely accused of not being from Myanmar. It is a truly vicious version of the familiar nationalism that's turned deadly in so many different countries. Samantha Power, who was Obama's ambassador to the United Nations and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about mass atrocities and genocide, told me that this was a degree of prejudice that she had rarely seen in all of her travels. In recent weeks, this situation has exploded. And to be honest, I didn't have any idea how bad it had gotten until I started researching for this episode.

My experience working on Myanmar had been very different. I visited the country with President Obama back in 2012, and he was the first sitting U.S. president ever to visit the country. I was there when he met with the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was considered by many to be the Nelson Mandela of Myanmar. We had her lakeside villa where she'd been kept under house arrest for many years. The day he met with activists, organizers, dissidents, he gave a speech at the University of Yangon. It felt like the opening of a new era for the country and the people of Myanmar, and it truly felt historic. It still may turn out to be a historic opening and visit, but the situation today is far from hopeful. It is, in fact, horrific.

The military is driving hundreds of thousands of innocent Rohingya men, women, and children from their homes. They're burning down their villages. They're indiscriminately slaughtering them along the way. It is undoubtedly ethnic cleansing, and some are calling this a modern genocide. So today's episode is based on interviews with two experts who help me understand the situation on the ground. We recorded these interviews separately, but edited them together to give you multiple perspectives on the situation. You'll hear from Sally Smith, the executive director of the Nexus Fund, which is a nonprofit organization Sally founded to prevent mass atrocities,

and Nick Christoph, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, who has spent his career documenting human rights abuses and injustices around the world. It's not easy to read or hear about some of the things that are happening. It's not easy to hear this episode, but the violence is happening right now. And there's still time and there's still a chance for the international community to put pressure on the government in Myanmar and force them to stop. and there's time to raise money to get aid to people who are suffering and who desperately need our help. For more information about the situation and how to help, go to the Pod Save the World Facebook page

or go to the Nexus Fund website at www.n.n.org to donate. Thanks for listening. We start with Nick Christoph. I'm familiar with the Rohingya. They are a Muslim minority group that lives in Burma or Myanmar. I was aware of the history of discrimination they faced and some of the awful treatment. But it wasn't until I read a piece you wrote a couple weeks ago now about just how bad things have gotten that I truly understood the degree to which they were suffering and being driven out of their country. Can you talk a little bit about what has happened recently that has gotten this crisis to such an acute level? Sure. So the Rohingya have been persecuted for years and years and years. years and disenfranchised, and this gradually radicalized them. And so an armed group appeared

among them with the somewhat crazy idea that they were going to fight back against the Myanmar government. And so a year ago, half-heartedly, and then in August more vigorously, they attacked Myanmar government institutions, police stations, and an army base. And it wasn't effective at all as an insurrection, but it did lead Myanmar to mount a brutal scorched earth attack on ordinary Rohingya civilians. And the upshot is that 400,000 of the Rohingya have been driven out of Myanmar across the border into Bangladesh. Countless homes have been burned and villages destroyed. I believe that the Myanmar government itself said that 60% of the Rohingya villages have now been abandoned. And many, many people, we don't have a good count, have been killed in the scorched earth operation,

and women raped, counts of infants being flung into lakes to drown, this kind of thing. It is about as brutal as an ethnic cleansing can get. When you read about these atrocities, the military, beheading six-year-old children. It is, I think, for a lot of people, incomprehensible. The idea that a military force, human beings could do this to another. But how do you think this happens?

Like, why do you think that they go to these extreme lengths to terrorize a group of children? Because there's a few reasons. They don't see them as human. You know, in every mass atrocity situation, you have an escalating level of dehumanization by the perpetrators. And so they start. using words like they're cockroaches and rats. We've seen this in the Holocaust in Darfur in Rwanda.

And when you start doing that and you start saying that and you start thinking about people that way, it means it's time to exterminate them and that you're, again, doing a good thing by killing them. Now, to kill a child, obviously it is incomprehensible, but it does happen because they don't want them to grow up into the Muslims that they fear today. So, you know, this is nothing new. in history. It's not like let's be so shocked. It's horrendous. But I think that what happens when you're shocked or it seems incomprehensible is that you become paralyzed and then you don't take action. And right now, what they need more than anything is for the rest of the world to take action. Do you think that this was the Myanmar government or the military waiting for an opportunity

to take actions against a minority group they have long despised? Or was this actually in response to this insurgent activity? I think that to some degree it probably was in response to this insurgency, which, of course, they had helped create with their earlier repression. There have been these periods of brutal repression of the Rohingya. And then there tends to be an outcry. The government tends to back off a little bit, allow a little more outside humanitarian help. and then there is some other episode that sets them off.

But, you know, one of the really troubling things, I think, is the way democratic politics have affected this. And obviously, I'm in favor of democracy. Obviously, you are. But one of the challenges in Myanmar has been that as it has become more democratic, one of the rallying cries to win votes has been, how much do we hate Muslim minorities and how much do we want to drive out the Rohingya? So democracy, in effect, has created not a break on this kind of repression, but rather perhaps a spur to it. Do you think it was a mistake by the Obama administration to restore relations with Burma too soon?

And relatedly, do you think the world made a mistake by putting so much hope in one person, Aung San Suu Kyi? So I think that engagement is almost always worth it. And so I think that the Obama administration was right to engage with Burma, to make those trips. I do think that the Obama administration then got into the position where it was regarding Myanmar as one of its great successes at a time when it was under a lot of criticism for problems in the Middle East and elsewhere. And perhaps that made it too reluctant to speak out about what was going on with the Rohingya. and in any case, I think it, I don't fault the engagement with Myanmar. I do fault, I mean, the administration, they did speak out, but I think they could have spoke out more forcefully and made it clearer to the government that, you know, if they did

the kind of things they're doing now, that there would be a real price to pay for that. And indeed, yeah, I think we were all a little bit too starry-eyed about Aung San Suu Kyi. She was an amazing fighter against the military regime, and we all celebrated when she won the Nobel Peace Prize. We were inspired by her words, but it turned out that she meant to apply those words and those aspirations largely to the Buddhist ethnic majority in Myanmar, and does not seem to think that those words apply equally to the Rohingya men. minority. Yeah. Nearly 400,000 people, as you reported, have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh in just a few weeks. That's like moving the city of Cleveland or the city of New Orleans to another country in a matter of days. Is there any sense that Bangladesh is ready to support that massive flow of refugees?

So historically, Bangladesh has done a pretty poor job of accommodating their Rohingya. And there have been huge flows of Rohingya in the past, and Bangladesh has put them up in camps, offered them few educational or job opportunities. In general, I'd say, has not handled them very well. One thing that is a little bit different is that today the expulsion of the Rohingya, the repression of the Rohingya has attracted a huge amount of attention in the Muslim world all around the globe, including the Arab countries. And so I think that there may be somewhat greater flows of money to help Rohingya refugees and there have been in the past. I think that Bangladesh, there may be more attention and publicity and ways that will lead Bangladesh to do a

better job. But unfortunately, the other side of the coin is that there's also indication that there are going to be more foreign fighters, perhaps flowing into Burma, to join these rebel forces in fighting the Myanmar government. And, you know, this is just a prescription for disaster. If there's a civil war there in Rakhine State, it won't be good for the government. It also certainly won't be good for those Rohingya who were left behind there. Sally, what can people listening do to help? People really need to get there and get there now to help Bangladesh, because they don't really have the resources and the infrastructure to manage this amount of people. I mean, this is a biblical amount of people that are flooding into this country.

And from the estimates of our partners fortify rights who are on the ground and at the border, they say it could be upwards of a million within a week. Oh, my God. They want them to leave, right? They're doing this on purpose. And they're shooting at men, women, and children, civilians, civilians, shooting at them as they flee into Bangladesh as well. So killing as many as they can, getting rid of the rest.

How concerned are counterterrorism experts that you talk to that the actions of the Myanmar government and military are going to set the stage for ISIS to come in and really radicalize a generation of Rohingya who are being treated in the worst possible way by their government? So, I mean, what we don't know about the Rohingya and Rohingi and Rakhine State could fill volumes. I mean, it's really, this isn't an area where we know a lot. It's been very difficult to get in there and travel around. I managed to make two trips into Rakhine State, but I couldn't get to large swaths of it, especially in the northern part. And you hear a lot about ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but I do think that in the past it's mostly been talk. And in general, I'd say that people have responded to their desperation more by paying human smugglers and trying to leave to go to Thailand or Malaysia, to try to start

over rather than to try to fight back, you have the sense that in the last year or so that is changing. And what will really change it is if you end up getting a pipeline of money and guns into Rakhine State. And there are some indications that that is now happening. And people are just so outraged. I mean, they've seen family members rape. They've seen children drown. They've seen these villages burned and the refugees on the Bangladesh side, they can look across and they see smoke filling the skies as their villages and these huts all have that's true, so they burn very easily. They see, you know, these fires from their own villages. And of course, they're furious about it. And a lot of them want to fight. This is probably not great to speculate if ISIS might come.

What we do know is that the worst things imaginable happen to people in the most desperate situations. And you see human trafficking and all sorts of assorted horrors come along with situations like this. Are there aid organizations that are providing relief or support to refugees that you think Americans listening should support today to try to do something? Yeah. So there are a lot of aid groups that are on the Bangladesh side of the border, international. school committee, the whole lot of them are there, and they, and because the issue is getting a lot of attention, so they're active there. The real problem is for the 600,000 or so Rohingya, who are left on the Myanmar side, and they're not getting help. There are a little more than 100,000

who are in, effectively a concentration camp in the city of Sitway. They're locked up there. They're not allowed to go to schools. They're not allowed to get easy medical care on one of my visits. There was a woman who was in obstructed labor. She desperately needed a C-section to save her life and the life of her baby. And she could not get it. The only medical support she had was from a pharmacist. And so those folks, they get a little bit of help from those folks who were in this concentration camp. some visits by some aid groups, including the International Rescue Committee, but outside of Sitway, especially in the northern part of Rakhine State, aid groups are just not allowed to move. There is no humanitarian access whatsoever. And I think that has to be one of the first things

that we have to do to pressure the Myanmar government to provide that access. And so, I mean, I'd say that in general, when people ask me today what they can do to help, I would put less emphasis on the need for provision of services and more for advocacy. There are groups like Fortify Rights that are focused on advocacy for the Rohingya because what we need is to get that access by aid groups to get into rural parts of Rakhine States so that they can begin to provide services. Sally, what does your nonprofit the Nexus Fund do? So the Nexus Fund is dedicated to preventing mass atrocities.

around the world, which includes genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity. And our model is actually based on, you know, I came out of the Obama campaign 0708, and I really believe in empowering locals. And I think what we've been doing in aid is going into other countries and telling them, you know, basically putting a project on top of their lives and saying, you know, here's a bunch of money for this project that we've decided because I went to Brown and got my master's, you know, and I read about you. that this is what we're going to do. And what I figured out over the last 10 years or so is that that doesn't work, right?

And I think the aid community is actually coming to that conclusion as well. So our model is really about going in, finding locals, talking to them about who is addressing the risk factors for genocide of mass atrocities in their communities and then supporting them. So whatever that means, whether that's through, you know, funding resources or training or connecting them with other people in the world who have already been through what they're through so they don't have to reinvent the wheel. For anything that I care about, I have four words that I always keep in mind. Knowledge, social, time and money.

So knowledge is, you've done it. Pat yourself on the back. You're listening to this podcast. You're learning about the Rohingya. Social is share with people, you know, like in person when you see people bring it up on your Facebook and Twitter, like please talk about it. The more it actually gets talked about, that is important. And then time and money is, you know, I would say normally it's like volunteer time, but

we're not going to fly everybody over to Burma. What we really need is your donations. And I know save the children could use their donations, so I'm not just here to pitch my own organization. But this is what's crazy to me, Tommy, is this is an orphan cause. There are zero donors working on this cause at a full time. Like there are donors that give a little bit here and there.

The pie isn't big enough. You know, there's not enough money to go around. People's resources are stretched really thin. And I'm not saying that to say, say that, you know, everybody's just swimming in a pool of their money. There's a desperate need, and we really need the pie to get bigger. So one of the things I'm really trying to do is bring more funders into this field and into this issue in particular.

Because I think there's an assumption that people are funding efforts that need to be done and helping, and they're not. So the UN General Assembly is this week. Ankhundsouchi was supposed to come to New York, but now it was not going to come. Do you have any sense that there will be efforts to take some sort of meaningful collective action to either highlight the treatment of the Rohingya or put pressure on the government to allow access, like you said, or to stop with this horrific ethnic cleansing? So there certainly will be more attention on it.

And the Muslim world is very concerned about this. It's getting a lot of attention in the Arab press, in Indonesia, and so on. I don't think that there is likely to be effective UN action. partly because in the Security Council, China is going to protect Burma. I think that China, to some degree, sees this is an opportunity to peel Burma away from U.S. orbit and into its own orbit. And there's been some competition over the last 20 years between China and the U.S. over, who will be Burma's protector down the road.

In the past, the U.S. had been winning that, and this may be an opportunity for China to make strides in the most cynical way. So I don't think the Security Council has a very good toolbox, given China's resistance. And the UN agencies haven't been terribly effective, partly because they tend to work in a fairly collegial way, and they're not good, except for the High Commissioner on Human Rights, about standing up and using the bully pulpit. You know, you sort of have a choice. You can look away. You can say there's nothing we can do and throw your hair.

hands up, or you can decide to raise awareness to call members of Congress to support aid groups doing great work and support journalists who are covering these stories. So thank you for what you're doing to bring the world's attention here. Yeah. Let me mention a couple of things that are, you know, you mentioned Congress. So there is Senate resolution that is in the works, sponsored by Senator Durbin and Senator McCain that indeed does call on Aung San Suu Kyi to try to live up to her values on the Rohingya. It's a way of applying a little bit more pressure. Similar pressure led Senator McCain to take a measure out of a bill and thus make it more difficult for weapons to flow to the Myanmar military, which I think is a useful signal to them. And I'm glad you

mention journalists, because, you know, this to me is just a great example of why we need people out in the field, including maybe above all photographers and video journalists, documenting this kind of thing, because once it's projected into our living rooms and onto our laptops, it's really hard to turn away. And I think it's those images that are going to galvanize us. And I hope lead to some kind of improvement in the situation. Sally, how can people encourage the United States government to put pressure on Myanmar to stop this ethnic cleansing? International political pressure is so paramount right now. So please do pick up the phone and call your member of Congress and tell them, just say, I care about the issue of the Rohingya.

What are you going to do about it? Thank you for listening to POTSE of the World and for caring about this issue. Again, if you want more information, go to the POTS of the World Facebook page. We'll have links for all the places you can donate on all the groups who are helping. You can also go to the Nexus Fund website at www. n-N-E-X-U-S-Fund.org to donate and to sign up to help out. Sally's cause. So thank you again.