Internal conflict, appropriately located, spells geopolitical opportunity. With U.S. ally Saudi Arabia funding and stoking Rohingya insurgencies, the U.S. creates a chance to blockade China’s oil supply and provide Aung San Suu Kyi the military cooperation needed to wrest Myanmar back from Chinese influence.
YANGON, MYANMAR – (Analysis) In recent years, Myanmar (formerly Burma) has only rarely been in the news. The quiet treatment owed much to the assumption that the country’s fledgling democracy was in “good hands” once the U.S-backed 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi gained renewed political prominence after the 2015 elections and assumed the office of state counselor a year later. However, the tide of international public opinion has been turning sharply against Suu Kyi as human rights activists, the United Nations and several other Nobel laureates have strongly criticized her handling of what has now become known as the “Rohingya crisis.”
The crisis centers on the plight of the Rohingya, a historically persecuted Muslim minority living in Myanmar’s coastal Rakhine state (formerly Arakan state). The Rohingya are also stateless, as Myanmar’s government has long refused to recognize their centuries-long claim to the region and has asserted on several occasions that the Rohingya are not native to Myanmar but instead “illegal immigrants” from neighboring Bangladesh. Deprived of citizenship and thus of basic rights, their suffering has been compounded by Myanmar’s government, which has used the military to violently intimidate the Rohingya and force them from their lands.
This month, in particular, the corporate media — as well as several prominent human rights organizations and international bodies, such as the UN — have given unprecedented attention to the conflict. Last Monday, for example, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, accused Myanmar of undertaking “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and stated that Myanmar’s campaign against the Rohingya violated international law. In the first two weeks of September, corporate media outlets have reported extensively on the crisis. Just last week, CNN published 13 different articles about the Rohingya’s plight. Calls have mounted for Suu Kyi, as Myanmar’s leader, to intervene.
Given the recent flurry of press coverage and the spike in concern among international bodies such as the United Nations, one might assume that the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya by Myanmar’s government is a recent phenomenon. However, in reality, the conflict itself is nearly a century old and its current escalation did not begin this year, but rather in 2011, and has continued to worsen ever since. Furthermore, numerous other instances of genocide, such as the Saudis’ destruction of Yemen and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, are hardly touched by the corporate media or mentioned in mainstream political discourse.
So why the sudden interest in Myanmar?
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