How Long Will Bangladesh Remain Saddled with The Rohingya Problem?

Awami League government in Bangladesh has over the past decade expanded economic and political cooperation with Beijing, a relationship that the latter is happy to continue building as it seeks to reduce its reliance on traditional allies India and Western countries

by Kazi Anwarul Masud

 

December 11, 2023

 

7 mins read

 

A Rohingya refugee man pulls a child as they walk to the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal in Shah Porir Dwip. [Photo: Reuters]

INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, there have been incidents of genocide on particular people often based on religion. The most horrific one has been the Holocaust by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany which still stirs the conscience of the people of the world. Such a genocide is taking place in Myanmar and the burden has been placed on the shoulders of Bangladesh, itself a developing country fighting its way out of poverty to a developing one. In June 2021 Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister told the attendees in New York of the bold decision and humanitarian gesture of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to provide shelter to the over a million Rohingya, as they fled atrocities in Myanmar, and the efforts of the government to ensure the wellbeing of Rohingya despite severe resources and space constraints.

Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister recalled the efforts of the international community including the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council in keeping the issue of Rohingya alive; while the efforts of the Security Council have always fallen short of concrete actions. He expressed hope that the Council would fulfill its Charter obligations and take urgent measures to resolve the crisis in Myanmar so that the Rohingya people can return to their homes in safety, security, and dignity. He also urged the regional countries and other stakeholders to play their due role.

The Foreign Minister recalled the efforts of the international community including the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council in keeping the issue of Rohingya alive; while the efforts of the Security Council have always fallen short of concrete actions. He expressed hope that the Council would fulfill its Charter obligations and take urgent measures to resolve the crisis in Myanmar so that the Rohingya people can return to their homes in safety, security, and dignity. He also urged the regional countries and other stakeholders to play their due role. He thanked the then President of the United Nations General Assembly (PGA) for convening the upcoming plenary session on Myanmar in the General Assembly.

US’ UNEQUIVOCAL SUPPORT TO BANGLADESH

As expected of the leader of the free world the United States of America strongly supported Bangladesh on the Rohingya issue, unfortunately, China and India’s geopolitical and geo-economic interests in Myanmar left Bangladesh to manage the Rohingya crisis alone.  All three countries are eager to see repatriation take place, albeit for very different reasons. Myanmar’s military regime wants some refugees to return to assist with its definition at the International Court of Justice, where The Gambia has brought a case against it under the Genocide Convention for the 2017 crackdown on the Rohingya in Rakhine State. 

WOULD THE MYANMAR MILITARY JUNTA TAKE BACK ROHINGYA REFUGEES?

From the regime’s point of view, allowing returns would undermine allegations that it committed genocide, which requires showing that the perpetrator had genocidal intent. More broadly, and however wishful its thinking may be, it believes that repatriation will alleviate the international pressure it is facing in the post-coup crisis. Yet it will only be willing to take back a limited number of refugees – likely far short of the 750,000-plus who entered Bangladesh in 2016-2017.

Myanmar authorities say no more than 500,000 fled to Bangladesh, claiming that some of these people are “newcomers” who had migrated illegally to Rakhine State. They have so far reviewed the eligibility of barely 15 percent of the Rohingya whom Bangladesh has put forward for repatriation. Of those, they have rejected around one-third. An official told Crisis Group that the process would move slowly, as the Myanmar side wanted to make sure there were no “extremists” among the returnees. The official added: “Those refugees who have settled in Myanmar for generations will want to come back and getting citizenship should be easy for them. Those who are newcomers from Bangladesh, they won’t want to come back”

INTRA-POLITICAL RIVALRY ON ROHYNGA ISSUE IN BANGLADESH

Bangladesh’s ruling political party, the Awami League government, was keen to show progress on repatriation to the public, including ahead of a general election scheduled for January 2024. At first, the decision to accept Rohingya refugees was popular in the Muslim-majority country. But over six years on, many are growing impatient with the situation, particularly Bangladeshis in Cox’s Bazar. Recent large-scale surveys have shown there is little support for even allowing the Rohingya to stay in Bangladesh until it is safe to return. Meanwhile, the opposition Bangladeshi Nationalist Party (BNP) has criticized the government’s handling of the crisis and put forward its sixteen-point plan for “resolving” it.  

CHINESE GAME IN ROHYNGA ISSUE

For China, facilitating Rohingya repatriation is an opportunity to cement its position as a partner of Dhaka and Naypyitaw, the capital of Myanmar, at a time of heightened geopolitical competition with the U.S. It also wishes to project an image as a constructive player in the international arena – burnishing its credentials as a mediator, following its brokering of an agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March. Since it emerged from its extremely stringent pandemic management measures, which it lifted in December 2022, and appointed a special envoy for Asian affairs at the end of 2022, Beijing has stepped up its engagement in Myanmar and seems keen to increase its leverage with the military regime. Meanwhile, the Awami League government in Bangladesh has over the past decade expanded economic and political cooperation with Beijing, a relationship that the latter is happy to continue building as it seeks to reduce its reliance on traditional allies India and Western countries (US -Bangladesh Relations on Rohynga Issue).

MYANMAR MILITARY JUNTA CONTINUES PERSECUTION

In one of the latest reports, Doctors Without Borders calculated that at least 6,700 Rohingya people died violently in the first month of the campaign by the Burmese military, including 730 children. The head of the UN Agency for Human Rights later referred to the military’s conduct as “acts of horrific barbarity,” potential “acts of genocide,” and “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. While International Crisis Group (ICG) says, “To date, not a single refugee has returned to Rakhine State through the formal repatriation mechanism that Myanmar and Bangladesh set up in November 2017.” Since the military overthrew Aung San Su Ki’s government in February 2021, the political, economic, and humanitarian crises in Burma have only worsened. According to sources, there have been close to 3,000 fatalities, close to 17,000 arrests, and more than 1.5 million displaced people.

The continued scorched-earth effort by the dictatorship continues to do harm and take the lives of innocent people, halting discussions about the return of Rohingya, igniting an escalating military conflict inside of Burma, and fostering insecurity outside of its borders.  Bangladesh continues to house them despite being forced to use a significant portion of her meagre resources to cover expenditures and mitigate effects on her economy, society, and environment. In this path of providing humanitarian aid to the Rohingya, Bangladesh is joined by numerous European, British, and American countries. 

The United States of America, in particular, has pledged massive assistance to Bangladesh in its efforts to shelter Rohingyas. Since the crisis, the United States has been the single most important country in providing funds for Rohingya refugees. Since 2017, the United States has provided more than $1.9 billion in humanitarian assistance to people in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and other parts of the region. The United States remains firm in its position that the regime’s planned elections cannot be free or fair, not while the regime has killed, detained, or forced possible contenders to flee, nor while it continues to inflict brutal violence against its peaceful opponents. The United States vows to continue to promote accountability for the military’s atrocities, including through support to the UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar and other international efforts to protect and support vulnerable populations, including Rohingya.  The United States is working with ASEAN, the United Nations (following the recent passage of a UN Security Council Resolution on the situation in Burma), and the international community at large to uphold ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus, increase diplomatic and economic pressure on the military, and support a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous Burma. 

In December 2022, both houses of the US legislature has passed for the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes — the US’s support to return to a democratic govt., providing non-military assistance to EAOs and PDFs, funds to support the pro-democracy movement, assisting in ethnic reconciliation, protecting political prisoners, and investigating and documenting atrocities. In December of last year, 24 of the selected 62 Rohingyas left Bangladesh for the United States as part of the US government’s resettlement program. According to the US Embassy in Dhaka, US President Biden reaffirmed the US commitment to welcoming refugees by keeping the total admissions target in the Presidential Determination on Refugee Admissions for 2022-23 at 125,000, with a regional allocation of 15,000 for East Asia.  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, State Department Counsellor Derek Chollet, Assistant Secretary of the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, Julieta Valls Noyes, and other top diplomats expressed the same ideology as Bangladesh that the ‘root cause of the Rohingya crisis lies in Myanmar’ and that ‘safe and dignified repatriation of Rohingyas to Myanmar’ is the only sustainable solution. 

CONCLUSION

One would have thought that the Holocaust was the result of paranoia of Adolf Hitler for blaming the Jews for the German defeat in the First World War, the acquiescence of the great powers of Hitler’s intention to have a pure German race, and his miscalculation of the nature of Joseph Stalin and then the Soviet Union which finally goaded Hitler to the “Final Solution” of extermination of the Jews from the world. According to Encyclopedia Britannica German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, (August 23, 1939), a nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union that was concluded only a few days before the beginning of World War II and which divided eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The Soviet Union had been unable to reach a collective security agreement with Britain and France against Nazi Germany. By early 1939 the Soviets faced the prospect of resisting German military expansion in Eastern Europe virtually alone.  In May 1939, Joseph Stalin began negotiations with the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop.

The Soviets also kept negotiating with Britain and France, but in the end, Stalin chose to reach an agreement with Germany. By doing so he hoped to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany and to gain time to build up the Soviet military establishment. The Western democracies’ hesitance in opposing Adolf Hitler, along with Stalin’s inexplicable personal preference for the Nazis, also played a part in Stalin’s final choice. For his part, Hitler wanted a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union so that his armies could invade Poland virtually unopposed by a major power, after which Germany could deal with the forces of France and Britain. 

The end result of the German-Soviet negotiations was the Nonaggression Pact signed by   Ribbentrop and Molotov in the presence of Stalin, in Moscow. It would be unnecessary to go further into the history of the Second World War Suffice it would be to say that the world should be more active in sharing with Bangladesh the unbearable burden of the Rohingya crisis which without splitting hair is now on the verge of genocide.

 

US President Joe Biden with India's PM Narendra Modi and G20 leaders as they arrive at the Samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat, in New Delhi on September 10, 2023. Photo Credit: India PM Office

India The Largest Democracy In The World – OpEd

 December 11, 2023  0 Comments

By Ambassador Kazi Anwarul Masud

Respected British magazine in its June 15,, 2023 issue termed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the most popularly elected Prime Minister despite his odious treatment of the minority Muslim community. With an approval rating of 77%, the Prime Minister is more than twice as popular as his party. He is by far the world’s most popular elected leader. Asked to give relative weight to the factors including the failure of the opposition Congress Party of Rahul Gandhi, whose great grandfather Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, grandmother Indira Gandhi, and father Rajiv Gandhi were all elected Prime Ministers of India. Yet Narendra Modi’s popularity is attributed mainly to the ineffectiveness of his opponents and 65% to his political skills.

Analysts attributed Narendra Modi’s popularity only 15% which could seem surprising, given how conspicuous it is. Patrick Wintour Diplomatic Editor of The Guardian in a write-up (dated 8th September 2023) wrote at length that President Joe Biden took fresh steps to lure India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi into an alliance designed to contain China, at a bilateral meeting in Delhi where the pair struck a series of commercial and defense deals covering remote-controlled aircraft, semiconductors, and quantum computing. However, the question of press freedom also dominated the agenda on the eve of the full G20 summit.  Before the bilateral at the Prime Minister’s residence, the US press corps, used to being given privileged access to the Joe Biden were told to remain outside in a van, out of eyesight of the two leaders. Biden received a Bollywood-style greeting after landing onboard Air Force One. The meeting was given an added symbolic importance as Biden was able to seize upon Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision not to attend Modi’s much-vaunted summit.

The US is trying gradually to make the traditionally neutral India a more explicit partner and part of a wider political and defense alliance in the Indo-Pacific. The White House said in a statement after the meeting that Biden welcomed the joint commitment to democratic values, and specifically that he welcomed an Indian defense department request to buy US-built remotely controlled aircraft. India has several disputes with China but it has been wary of joining an implicitly anti-Beijing alliance. Kurt Campbell, the White House Indo-Pacific envoy, said relations with India continued to be a work in progress. The two leaders agreed to progress agreements reached in June this year when Modi visited Washington, including a deal to allow General Electric to produce jet engines in India to power Indian military aircraft. 

The US does not expect to make immediate progress in shifting India from its largely neutral stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine but believes that if it can start to replace Russia as a leading arms supplier to Delhi, India will have greater latitude to criticize Moscow. The episode with the journalists accompanying Biden underlined the state of press freedom in India despite the two leaders’ stated shared commitment to democracy. Narendra Modi released a handful of official photographs of the meeting, showing the two leaders seated side by side and chatting amiably. Biden decided to delay his planned post-summit press conference and hold it at his next stop in Vietnam, reflecting the tight press controls being mounted by the Indian security services. The incident comes after protracted negotiations were needed before Indian officials agreed to Modi taking one question from US reporters during his visit to Washington in June this year.

“The president believes the free press is the pillar of our democracy,” the White House spokesperson Karina Jean-Pierre told journalists onboard Air Force One, insisting they were doing all they could to secure media access. At the Washington press conference with Joe Biden in June the one question to Modi came from the Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui, who asked the Hindu nationalist about accusations of repression of Muslims in India and the country’s record on human rights. Siddiqui was subsequently subjected to “intense online harassment”, the White House Correspondents’ Association said, “including from people with ties to the prime minister’s political party”. 

India ranks 161 out of 180 in this year’s Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. In recent years, journalists have been arrested and some are stopped from traveling abroad. Dozens are facing criminal prosecution, including for sedition. The government has also introduced sweeping regulatory laws for social media companies that give it more power to police online content. Several media outlets critical of Modi have been subjected to tax searches, including the BBC after it aired a documentary that examined the prime minister’s role in 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat, where he was chief minister at the time. The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, joined the bilateral, as did the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. Indian attendees included the external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and the security adviser Ajit Doval. 

Biden is bringing cash for the World Bank and promises on the climate crisis that he hopes will show debt-ridden economies in Africa that he has their interest at heart in a way that the Chinese Belt and Road infrastructure project does not. President Biden sets great store by personal relations in diplomacy and has done as much with Narendra Modi as with any other world leader to cultivate a personal relationship. He continues to raise human rights but it is clear Biden has put the treatment of religious minorities in India on a relative back burner. Chinese-Indian relations were damaged before the summit as the Chinese ministry of natural resources website displayed Arunachal Pradesh and the Doklam Plateau – over which the two sides have feuded – as included within Chinese borders, along with Aksai Chin in the western section that China controls but India still claims.

President Biden’s preference for personal relationship with world leaders was evident in Vice President Kamal Harris’s recent visit to the Middle East to explain US Middle East policy to the Arab leaders. Kamala Harris’s visit to Dubai demonstrated President Biden’s strategy of having the Vice President personally lead U.S. efforts to start conceiving what the “day after” may look like for Israel, the people of Palestine, the region, and the world—the Biden administration is making it clear that it is taking a comprehensive, strategic approach to managing the current crisis. Her visit also demonstrated President Biden’s preference that unlike many other Vice President’s in past administrations Joe Biden would like Kamala Harris to shoulder the responsibility of conducting foreign affairs as personal emissary of the US President. It, however, remains to be seen whether future Presidents would follow such practice and its justification thereof.  

Conclusion

Coming back to India the writer believes that given Pakistan’s strong belief that it is India’s nemesis and is destined to continue its unending enmity despite millions of Muslims had voted with their feet to remain in Pandit Nehru’s India and not go to army ruled Pakistan. The present anti-Muslim pogrom conducted by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Jajata Party adherents is difficult to explain for a country which always prided itself as the largest practicing democracy in the world. One hopes that India will steer clear of this quirk of history and will regain its true self as the largest democracy in the world. 

 

Henry Kissinger. Photo by David Shankbone, Wikipedia Commons.

The Legacy Of Henry Kissinger – OpEd

 December 4, 2023  1 Comment

By Ambassador Kazi Anwarul Masud

Bengalis of all generations would remember with a shiver the insufferable genocide perpetrated by the Pakistani military junta on unarmed people of then East Pakistan and with gratitude to Ishaan Tharoor of Washington Post for his article titled Keeping Dhaka Ghosts Alive (24 September 2023) for reminding the present generation of the shock and disbelief that my generation had seen and suffered. 

Amazingly, writes Jessica T Mathews in Foreign Affairs article (Profiles in Power-The World according to Henry Kissinger-January/February 2023) that Kissinger raised the  bar still higher, and even  posited  that a “global war over Bangladesh” was “possible.” Few would dispute that Nixon and Kissinger were juggling critical U.S. relations with both China and the Soviet Union or that the opening of relations with China held far greater strategic value in 1971 than did autonomy for East Pakistan. But serious questions remain. Did pursuing that opening requires the stance Washington took? When policy in a democracy requires secrecy because of widespread opposition, how often does it produce a beneficial result in the long run? Do illegal acts—in this case, arms transfers—by the government lower the threshold for bad behavior, leading others, in and out of government, to break the law? Is there a better balance to be found than obtained here between a realist concern for the national interest and a decent respect for human life, including brown, non-Christian life?

Such questions raised by Jessica Mathews could be found in Henry Kissinger’s life as a realist. One could also borrow from Harvard luminary Joseph Nye Jr’s opinion, “On the negative side of his ledger is the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile; the backing of Pakistan’s massive brutality against Bangladeshis and Bengalis in the early ’70s — some people would add East Timor, where he supported the government. But the biggest of all is Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia, which led to Pol Pot coming in with a genocidal regime. And then, the way that war ended, which is more controversial. Some people thought they ended it well. My view is that they could have ended sooner with far less loss of lives, both American and Vietnamese.” 

The main context of this article though is the death of Henry Kissinger who passed away at the ripe age of 100. The British paper The Economist which had a long conversation with Henry Kissinger before his death has written that nobody alive has more experience in international affairs, first as a scholar of 19th-century diplomacy, later as America’s national security adviser and secretary of state, and for the past 46 years as a consultant and emissary to monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. 

Referring to US-China tensions, Henry Kissinger expressed his worries. “Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger,” he says. “We are on the path to great-power confrontation.”  Henry Kissinger added that his alarm is caused by China’s and America’s intensifying competition for technological and economic pre-eminence. Even as Russia tumbles into China’s orbit and war overshadows Europe’s eastern flank, he feared that AI was about to supercharge the Sino-American rivalry. Around the world, the balance of power and the technological basis of warfare are shifting so fast and in so many ways that countries lack any settled principle on which they can establish order. If they cannot find one, they may resort to force. 

“We’re in the classic pre-World War I situation,” he said, “where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences.”  The Economist in its long write up added that in his view, the fate of humanity depends on whether America and China can get along. He believed the rapid progress of AI, in particular, leaves them only five-to-ten years to find a way. Despite a reputation for being conciliatory towards the government in Beijing, he acknowledged that many Chinese thinkers believe America is on a downward slope and that, “therefore, as a result of a historic evolution, they will eventually supplant us.” 

He believed that China’s leadership resents Western policymakers’ talk of a global rules-based order, when what they really mean is America’s rules and America’s order. China’s rulers are insulted by what they see as the condescending bargain offered by the West, of granting China privileges if it behaves (they surely think the privileges should be theirs by right, as a rising power). Indeed, some in China suspect that America will never treat it as an equal and that it’s foolish to imagine it might. However, Henry Kissinger also warned against misinterpreting China’s ambitions. In Washington, “They say China wants world domination…The answer is that they [in China] want to be powerful,” he said. “They’re not heading for world domination in a Hitlerian sense,”  “That is not how they think or have ever thought of world order.” In Nazi Germany war was inevitable because Adolf Hitler needed it, but China is different. He had met many Chinese leaders, starting with Mao Tse Tung . He did not doubt their ideological commitment, but this has always been welded onto a keen sense of their country’s interests and capabilities. 

Henry Kissinger saw the Chinese system as more Confucian than Marxist. That teaches Chinese leaders to attain the maximum strength of which their country is capable and to seek to be respected for their accomplishments. Chinese leaders want to be recognized as the international system’s final judges of their interests. “If they achieved superiority that can genuinely be used, would they drive it to the point of imposing Chinese culture?” he asks. “I don’t know. My instinct is No…[But] I believe it is in our capacity to prevent that situation from arising by a combination of diplomacy and force.” One natural American response to the challenge of China’s ambition is to probe it, as a way to identify how to sustain the equilibrium between the two powers. Another is to establish a permanent dialogue between China and America. China “is trying to play a global role. We have to assess at each point if the conceptions of a strategic role are compatible.” If they are not, then the question of force will arise.

Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post in an article on Henry Kissinger (November 30, 2023. Henry  Kissinger  The Titan of  Realism) quoted an obituary  in the New York Times by David E. Sanger summarizing Henry  Kissinger in the following words  “ considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era,” as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.” On that trampling of democratic values, Gary J. Bass writes for The Atlantic that Kissinger steered the US into some of the policies for which it is most criticized globally. Bass writes: “Yet for all the praise of Kissinger’s insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are better remembered for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world. How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?”

Harvard luminary Joseph Nye Jr. (Judging Henry Kissinger. Did the Ends Justify the Means? By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. November 30, 2023) he justified the genocide in Bangladesh by quoting his own words In the war of secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, Kissinger and Nixon were criticized for not condemning Pakistani President Yahya Khan for his repression and bloodshed in Bangladesh, which resulted in the deaths of at least 300,000 Bengalis and sent a flood of refugees into India. Kissinger argued that his silence was needed to secure Yahya’s help in establishing ties with China. But he has admitted that Nixon’s dislike of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which Kissinger abetted, was also a factor Unquote. Equally Joseph Nye Jr. asks how does Kissinger measures up on these criteria of moralism versus realism. In Joseph Nye’s words quote   He certainly had great successes: the opening of China, establishing détente with the Soviet Union, and managing crises in the Middle East, all of which made the world safer.

In China, for instance, Kissinger and Nixon had the vision and temerity to guide world politics away from Cold War bipolarity and reintegrate Beijing into the international system. They had to ignore the ugly nature of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian regime. Similarly, in managing détente and arms control with Moscow, Kissinger had to accept the legitimacy of another totalitarian regime and go slower than many Americans wanted in pushing the Kremlin to allow Jewish emigration. Nonetheless, his position helped lower the risk of nuclear war and create the conditions in which the Soviet Union itself gradually eroded. Here, again, the moral gains far outweighed the costs. And although he took risks by raising the alert level of U.S. nuclear forces to DEFCON 3 during the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, Kissinger’s judgment turned out to be right. Ultimately, he managed to reduce tensions Unquote. In short, it is too early to pass judgment on the success and failure of a person like Henry Kissinger. The present article is only a drop in the ocean of books, articles, and research papers to come in the future unveiling the complex character of Henry Kissinger who lived a life that very few individuals can aspire to live.