Pod Save the World - On the ground in Burma

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

Tommy talks with Senator Jeff Merkley about his fact-finding mission to Burma and Bangladesh to learn more about the ongoing ethnic cleansing and refugee crisis. They also discussed the Trump administration’s almost non-existent response, how social media has exacerbated the problem, and what Congress is trying to do to help.

Welcome back to Potta of the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for tuning in, as always. Today's episode is revisiting a topic I've discussed here before, which is ethnic cleansing happening in Burma right now as we speak. My guest is Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. He just got back from a delegation visit to Burma and Bangladesh to see for himself refugee camps to meet with government officials and try to figure out what is happening and what the United States government can do to respond. He has a great firsthand view of this situation. It is increasingly desperate. And he also offered some advice for how everyone listening can get involved and actually push the United States government to do more and support people who desperately need it. So thank you for tuning in.

And here's the interview. Today on Pod State of the World, I'd like to welcome United States Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon to the show. Senator Merkel is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he just returned home from a fact-finding mission to Burma and Bangladesh. to assess the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people there. And so I am incredibly grateful to him that he made time to join the show today and to help shine a light on this issue. Thank you, Senator. Oh, you're so welcome. And I appreciate you doing a podcast on it. Any podcast titled Save the World, we should be talking about what's going on in Burma. Yeah, we need a little more of that. So just to quickly catch people up on the situation, there is right now a horrific ethnic cleansing happening in Burma. The Burmese military has slaughtered thousands of innocent.

and people, they have raped women, they have targeted and murdered children. The sole goal of their terror is to drive the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group that has been in Burma for centuries out of the country. And it has been incredibly effective. More than 600,000 Rohingya have crossed the border and are clinging to life, basically, in refugee camps just on the other side of the border in Bangladesh. You just visited those refugee camps, so I was hoping we could start there. I believe you spent two days at camps or in Bangladesh. I believe one was established in the 90s and one was set up in like October of 2016. What did you hear from the people you met?

What did you see when you were on the ground in Bangladesh? You bet. We went to the Balukali refugee camp, which is a camp recently set up for the new wave of refugees. And what we saw was as far as the eye could see, one plastic tarp after another. folks were building split bamboo frames, draping plastic over the top. The type of shelters that work fine for a light rain with no wind, but will come right down when there's a real storm. And it was just, I don't know, to walk in to various settings there in the camp where children were collected, where women were collected, and to be able to carry on a conversation, albeit with interpreters.

For example, walked into a room of women who were getting educated about how to prevent there from being an epidemic, a disease epidemic in the camp. And I asked the question. Senator Durbin was with me, and I said, let's just stay for a minute and ask if any of these women would be willing to share a story. And I wasn't sure that they would to a Westerner from far away. But immediately the room erupted. And a woman jumped up and pulled up her sleeve to show scars from burns on her arm that came from her house burning down as she fled. Another woman stood up to share the horrific story of her child, her one-year-old child and her husband being killed. And the whole room was a buzz.

I think that these women wanted the world to know what had gone on. Their houses were burned down. Their villages were burned down. There was systematic rape. Children were killed in front of them. Men were shot leaving the village. And those who didn't directly experience violence were basically in a situation where they experienced violence against others in their neighborhood or in their village. And then we're told, if you don't leave right now, you're next.

And so they were fleeing for their lives. And thus this enormous, enormous cascade of individuals. You think of that over 600,000 people since August 25th, plunging into a country that has no room. The country of Bangladesh is half underwater. Half the entire country is less than 15 feet above sea level. It floods every year. And that country, which is not that large,

has 160 million people. So there's, they're just, the refugees are perched on hillsides among trees, any spare piece of land, anywhere they can find. So they're essentially intense with zero infrastructure. No one necessarily wants them there. Who is providing services? And what's the gap between the need and what's being provided by, I assume, is mostly international aid organizations?

Well, often when a flood of refugees occurs, a country, will shut its border to them. In this case, the prime minister, Sheik Hasina, basically said to her cabinet, we're not doing that. We are going to open our border. These people need a refuge. We're going to provide that. We're going to work with the United Nations and international aid organizations to assist. So there were groups like Mercy Corps and Red Cross providing assistance in partnership with UN organizations like the UN Population Fund. And we, we, should pause and give a huge thank you to Bangladesh and to the prime minister for her action, because the conditions would be so much more horrific had she not seen fit to enable people to escape.

Yeah, I agree with that. So you also visited Burma itself. You went to the Rakhine state, which is a sliver of land by the water where the Rohingya have lived for centuries. I believe you met with civil society groups. You visited a community that sounds like a ghetto. or de facto prison for the Rohingya. What did you see on the Burma side and hear from the people you met there? And how does their treatment compare to the treatment of individuals and refugee camps on the Bangladesh side?

So in September, Ansan Suu Kyi, the state minister, and I say state minister, we think of her as the president of Burma. However, their constitution doesn't allow her to be president. So when her party won the majority elections, she got a special title. special arrangement, if you will, but she's a civilian leader. In September, she gave a speech to the United Nations, and she invited the world to come see for themselves what was going on in Rakhine stays. She said, come visit the villages, see what's happening. Our delegation, our five members of Congress, took her up on that invitation, and we fully anticipated. We were led to believe we would be able to visit the sites of the villages and of the internally displaced

persons camps, IDP camps, and I'll come back to the in a moment. When we arrived in Rakhine State in Sitway, the capital, we found that we were not going to be allowed. The government had revoked permission to go to the IDP camps and to go to the villages. This tells you a lot. They are determined to seal the world off from seeing what happened. I mean, not only were villages burned, but many traces of the villages are being removed in order to make it more difficult for people to return. In that sense, it's really, I mean, doubles down on the words ethnic cleansing. They're really cleansing the ground, trying to make it difficult to have a possible return. There is one camp, though, in the capital of Sitway.

And you can think of this as a neighborhood that has been walled off from the rest of the city. Think of the Warsaw ghetto before it had big high walls. In this case, there are police stations at the end of each street and car barriers. So it's very clearly defined. People are not legally allowed to leave. If they were to sneak out, it would be a crime and they would be a return. There may be some punishment for that. They cannot go and open their shops, a small distance away.

They have to get permission to travel to an IDP camp for a health care condition to get a referral to travel back to the hospital that's just a few minutes away from their neighborhood. So it turns what should be a five-minute trip into a trip of many hours. They were dependent upon rice being donated from the government, and they're not getting enough of it. They are dependent on school teachers for their high school inside the neighborhood, and those teachers haven't returned since August 25th. They do have volunteer teachers for the lower grades from the community. But you can think of this as a prison within the city.

and there are many of them who voted in 2010 said to us that they they had had their voting rights stripped from them just after that. So this is a lighter version of the camps which have even more serious restrictions. I think very few Americans are aware that in central Rakhine, there are 120,000 people in these camps. And they've been in these camps for five years. And in northern Rakhine, where the villages were being burned, you now, have an estimated just one out of eight members of the Rohingya community are left, one out of eight. That shows the effectiveness of the assault of the government's effort to drive them out of the country. Yeah, I think that what you just outlined is what makes people who worked on this issue for a long time so angry and so frustrated is, you know,

as horrific as the recent events have been, this is a problem that they've seen coming for a very long time. The Rohingka have been treated like a pariah in their own country for far, far too long. But I'm also glad you raised Aung San Suu Kyi. Like you said, she's the state counselor of Burma, sort of similar to prime minister or president. But for decades, she was a political prisoner and an activist in Burma. She won a Nobel Peace Prize in the early 90s for what was seen as a heroic resistance. Today, she is being harshly criticized by some people. Some would argue she's complicit in this ethnic cleansing, that she deserves our contempt.

that her Nobel Peace Prize should be revoked. Others say she's in an impossible position because, like you said, her job is in some ways a figurehead. She is the military holds a lot of sway. They're actually conducting the ethnic cleansing and they hold all the real power. You met with some of her ministers. What did you hear from them? And where do you land over on this debate over how much blame she should shoulder? Yes, we met with the union minister for her office, who is the top government official.

We met with her national security advisor. We met with the union minister for social welfare. And we also had the chance on the military side to meet with one of the deputy ministers who covers the border affairs. Frame your answer. Let me turn the clock back to independence in the 1940s. From 19, I believe it was 48 through 1962 when there was a military coup. The Rohingya were pretty free to operate and participate to be involved in the U. country and after the military coup the oppression became much worse. Now the military over the past

decades has had an operating style of basically time and time again burning villages, systematic rape, oppression of rights and driving people out of the country. It's happened in a number of provinces so the Rakhine state is not unique. This brand of action, action is what was on full display to the world since August 25th. And it is the military that has under the Constitution full control of international security and domestic security. They also are able to appoint one-fourth of the parliament, and they have several key ministers for which they're guaranteed to make the appointments as well. And so they wield tremendous power. And it wasn't anticipated by the military that they would ever kind of not be in charge. The fact that

Ansan Suu Kyi's party won a majority despite the quarter of the seats given to the military was a surprise and an opportunity. But her government is to some significant degree a facade for still a country run by the military. And so when you think of war crimes, when you think of who's responsible for ethnic cleansing. It has to be the Burmese military that you're targeting. Now, this doesn't let her off the hook because she has a responsibility to call out these crimes against humanity. She has a responsibility to draw international attention. And when she issues an invitation of the world to come see what's going on,

she has a responsible and make sure that those who visit, like we did, actually get to see what is going on. And if our ability to visit was vetoed by the military, then she should say that. She has a responsibility to help design the changes that would lead to the Rohingya having the rights to operate as full participants in Burmese democracy. But she's been very unsympathetic to that. The prejudices against this ethnic group, this ethnic group of Muslims in a Buddhist state is huge. The general view of the citizenry, and polling says that this is held by 90% of the citizens in the country, is they view this population as illegitimate intruders, even though they have been there often for centuries. But the argument is that they were brought in under the colonial period as cheap,

labor, that they were brought in from across the river, that they aren't a legitimate minority. In fact, a 1982 law that laid out 135, recognized 135 ethnic groups in the country, deliberately excluded them from being mentioned. And at that point, a lot of them did lose their rights to vote and citizenship at that point. So that's the framing. And she has seemed to have shared that framing. and not stood up for these folks who have lived in the country for a couple hundred, hundred years. Yeah.

Once again, you know, social media is exacerbating the problem. Facebook in particular has been a key driver of this toxic fake news that exacerbates tensions between the Buddhist majority and the Rohingya, who, as you said, are a Muslim minority group. How do we deal with this spread of fake news and this incitement that's happening on Facebook? and relatedly, what does it do to our moral authority and our ability to address these problems and to push Burma and to push technology companies like Facebook to prevent the spread of inflammatory fake news when our own United States president is spreading racist, disgusting, anti-Muslim videos on Twitter just today?

Well, Tommy, I'm really glad you raised this because this is something that hasn't gotten much attention in the West and it helps explain why was, the reaction so much stronger this time than we have seen it some of the episodes of the past. And I should mention that there is a rebel group. It's known as ARSA or the Erikan Rohingya Salvation Army. It's a group of folks who do occasional strikes on military outposts, and they did conduct a strike on August 25th, and about a dozen security officers were killed in the course of that. And it was in reaction to that that the military swept in and started burning villages. There is no way that one can justify ethnic cleansing on the basis of a few rebels striking a couple of police outposts.

So I wanted to set that context. But part of what happened in the reaction, and by way, the military's reaction was aided by nearby Rakhine minorities that held the same view. and then as the military and then threatened these villagers and sometimes participate in the assaults on the villagers. So there was a group that from outside the military that amplified, helped amplify the reaction. And part of the reason that that reaction was so swift and so strong was because in just the last three years, Facebook has swept the country, and it is the Internet. It isn't like there is Facebook and it's a one spot you go to on the Internet. Essentially, it is the Internet there.

And so when people put up stories, fake stories of Rohingya attacking Rakhine or told stories about terrible, horrific attacks, one, people absolutely believe it. They believed anything posted on Facebook must be true or you wouldn't be allowed to post it. They don't really kind of digest, as we don't completely, that so many false stories are spread on Facebook. And so that inflamed emotional reactions that stemmed from the social media really added to the severity of the crimes that were committed. And you asked, you know, how do we address this? And you mentioned that our president put up videos, two videos today that our videos deliberately intended to inflame animosity and hatred and discrimination against Muslims. Right. And by the way, this is so.

unacceptable, unforgivable that our president should be driving these divisions. Our Pledge of Allegiance, one nation under God, indivisible. Well, our president doesn't understand the word indivisible. You don't understand that we are Americans. He wants to divide one group of Americans against another. He does it time and time again. He's done it against Mexicans. He's done it against African Americans. He's done it against disabled. He's done it against women. He's done it against veterans. And he certainly has done it probably than more than any other group against Muslims and Muslim Americans. And when he does that, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Muslim Americans. And I've already criticized the president for those videos he put up today, but it's beyond

conception that an American president should do that. And it certainly, as it did in Burma, amplifying animosities between groups, the president, our president, is engaged. in that right here. Yeah, I mean, people need to understand how much time administrations usually spend going to countries that don't have the respect for rule of law or freedom of the press that we do, and we push them to do hard things that we don't want to do. And if we hemorrhage our moral authority to push people to the right place by propagating fake news like this, by banning entire religion from our own country, we're weakening our national security, we're hurting ourselves diplomatically. And it's just, There's no way to fully account for how much harm he's doing on that front.

No, and in terms of national security, there are two pieces of this we should pay a lot of attention to. When you drive hundreds of thousands of Muslims into a refugee camp in Bangladesh, it becomes a place where radicalization can very easily breed. And I know Bangladesh is very, very concerned about this. You've been mistreated. Your land is gone. your world is gone, your family member has been slaughtered, and you're angry, and someone comes says, come join us and let's attack people that we hold responsible. And maybe that,

those people responsible are the Burmese military in their outposts. But maybe it's also like, look, the President of America didn't even say one word, not one word about what happened to us. And so this is a breeding ground for ISIS. And certainly President Trump should realize that that radicalization endangers our national security. I've been pushing for President Trump to speak publicly about this cleansing, this horrific crime against humanity. Our Secretary of State said that we needed to go through a formal process before we called it ethnic cleansing. The Secretary of State has completed that and has now called it ethnic cleansing. That's a step forward. but we have yet to hear one public word from President Trump on this issue.

And to the Muslim world, it looks like, well, if it was some other population, you would be saying with moral authority, this is unacceptable. But because it's Muslims that are being killed and raped and driven from their land, you're not saying a word. And that just feeds right into ISIS's recruiting strategy. Look, there are times when humanitarian responses and interventions are incredibly complicated. I approach this with a lot of humility as someone who worked on Syria policy and far from proud or are happy about the outcome there. But when you read books like Samantha Powers book A Problem from Hell, which talks about genocide and genocide prevention, or when you read about Rwanda and the Clinton administration's response in the 90s, there are things you can do that are well short of going to war to pressure countries to stop things like ethnic people. cleansing. It doesn't appear to me like the Trump administration has done any of it. They've announced 47 million humanitarian assistance. I guess Tillerson took one trip over there, but he's generally

pretty feckless. He's busy slashing jobs or whatever he does at state. As you noted, Trump hasn't said anything. How do we push them to do more? Like, where do you think the levers are? Well, one lever is through the United Nations. And we have participated in a dialogue there in the Security Council for a resolution that was going to be blocked by China. So the UN Security Council did put out a statement rather than a resolution. And then the third committee of the UN has voted on a draft resolution that will be forwarded to the full body and voted overwhelmingly in support of it, condemning what's taking place. I think, though, that this situation requires more than just statements and resolutions, we really have to have an international discussion

about the ways pressure can be applied. And that just isn't happening. And it won't happen as long as the President of the United States can't even say a public word about the challenge. By the way, you mentioned the challenge of responding about what you do after you have these refugees and the humility we should have. Bangladesh is working with Burma to work out. a strategy for repatriation. And they have an initial agreement initialed that hasn't been, been, the details haven't been released. But from what we hear, it basically probably doesn't address what needs to take place. My concern and the concern of many is that Bangladesh will be in a hurry to get people back across the border. Burma will proceed to put people into camps

rather than returning them to their villages. And to have more camps, I mean, these camps breed isolation, which breeds prejudice, which breeds discrimination, which breeds hatred. Putting people in camps is just unacceptable. And so people need to be able to go back to their village. They won't go back unless they have very, very strong guarantees of their safety because they are terrified of their vulnerability from the neighboring communities and from the military, they have to have a way to have a pathway to be participants in Burmese democracy.

They have to have voting rights. And this involves a huge change of mind from the vision that the country has had of these interlopers. We are going to exclude them. And maybe they'll leave someday. and when they don't leave, we'll kind of feel okay about ethnic cleansing. Right. We can't, the world can't let them feel okay about this,

or that this can possibly rebound to their favor. Yeah. And one of the things that's really scary right now is that the military has experienced a surge in popularity in response to them burning these villages and driving the Rohingya out of the country. And in the next elections, that could put the military in charge of the Democratic side

as well as the military side of the government. So if they just feel like the world's going to look the other way and not do anything serious, it's an invitation to continue this decades-long practice that they've had, this strategy of systematic village burning, systematic rape, systematic exclusion of rights and systematic driving people out of the country. Yeah, our silence truly does hurt in this situation. I know that Congress has tried to sort of step into the void and do something. Senator McCain, Senator Durbin, Senator Cardin. You have been working on legislation. My understanding is that, you know, there are discussions of targeted sanctions against key military leaders, discussions of cutting off military to military ties, limits on sort of precious metals and minerals that come out of Burma and that there's conversations that are ongoing about next steps. Can you give us a sense of what you think Congress may or may not do what people listening can do to help push that bill forward? And it

Explain why Senator McConnell seems hell-bent on preventing meaningful legislation from passing? So there is a resolution led by Senator Durbin that is a statement condemning the violence. Just debating that on the floor and voting on it and sending it over to the House would be valuable and important in terms of shining a broader light on this. To date, I've spoken on the floor about it and Senator Young, a Republican, and the chairman of the Multilateral Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, joined me on the floor, so it was great to have a bipartisan presentation. Then, in addition to the resolution, Senator McCain and Senator Cardin have worked on sanctions legislation, and this calls out ethnic cleansing.

It imposes visa bans and financial restrictions on targeted military leaders. It limits U.S. security and military assistance. One of the questions that we need to ask as we work on this sanctions legislation is how do we make sure it's targeted at the military. It was the military that has practiced this strategy for decades. It's the military that went in. It's the military that torched the villages. It's a military that shot at the people fleeing. It's a military that raped people.

It has to be targeted at the military. We don't have a lot of military interaction with where we're right now. During the Obama administration, we took actions to start some initial relationships and dialogue, and there are some training that occurs, but not much for their officers. And most of what is taking place is more about humanitarian responsibilities, appropriate conduct for the military. But the military does, you know, they're looking to the world. They don't want to be, they don't want to just be dependent upon China as the place to go to. And that's the way it was when the rest of the world, when they had sealed themselves off from the rest of the world. So we have some leverage here and how do we exercise it?

So certainly sanctions legislation is one possibility, but I also don't want to lose the point that just the attention from the President of the United States rallying the world to be part of a response is essential for us to operate on our own. and the rest of the world to do nothing wouldn't mean nearly what it would be if the whole international community focused on this issue. Yeah. My last question for your center because I know you have votes and I'm very grateful for your time.

People listening to this are probably pretty horrified as I am. What can we do to help? What aid groups did you see on the ground doing good work? What can we do to lobby Congress? What recommendations do you have? So the only aid group that's been allowed

into Rakhine State at this point is the Red Cross. There are other groups standing by ready to help groups like Mercy Corps, but certainly assisting the Red Cross would be relevant. Certainly lobbying your House and Senate members to weigh in on this, to tweet about it, to speak on the floor about it, to support legislation, to co-sponsor legislation about it, to ask their leadership on the House and Senate side

to put this issue on the floor in the form of resolution and in the form of a sanctions bill. All of that would be very helpful. What we're really suffering from right now is a lack of attention. There's a lot of attention to a potential government shutdown and funding bill. There's a lot of attention to a tax bill. There's a lot of attention to North Korea and a missile test. There's a lot of attention to so many things that this horrific situation is it just, The press isn't making it a banner event that the world needs to respond to.

So we really, really have to press on this. And I want to note that whereas President Trump called for cutting the funds for international organizations, one of the things that folks can lobby their House and Senate members for us is say, fund these international organizations, the types that help out in a whole very, variety of places, from Syrian refugees, as you mentioned, your work in Syria, to this situation, to the four famines happening in the Middle East and North Africa. Support foreign aid funding. These are pieces of the broader puzzle that are very relevant. Yeah, I agree. Senator, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for taking this trip and filling us in on what

you saw and your continued focus on this issue. It is very important. There is not nearly enough attention being paid to it. So I'm very grateful to you and the group that you went with for all the work you're doing. Well, thank you for using your podcast to direct attention to it. And hopefully we can get the United States really, really geared up in partnership with the world to make such activity absolutely unacceptable, to reverse what's been done there in Burma and to discourage other countries from ever doing anything like this. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

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