WSJ: Asia’s New Insurgency

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal on 19 December 2016 under the headline “Asia’s New Insurgency”.

Even as Burma has made dramatic progress toward democracy and pluralism, the military has waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim minority. The government has forced more than 100,000 into squalid camps and prevented them from receiving aid.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled abroad, many losing their lives in the process. Another million are still in western Burma’s Rakhine state, but they have difficulty finding work because the government stripped them of their citizenship in the 1980s.

Now this immoral policy has created a violent backlash. The world’s newest Muslim insurgency pits Saudi-backed Rohingya militants against Burmese security forces. As government troops take revenge on civilians, they risk inspiring more Rohingya to join the fight.

A report last week from the International Crisis Group (ICG) describes the new insurgent force that carried out a well-organized October attack on three border-police bases in Rakhine, killing nine police officers and setting off reprisals from the military.

Called Harakah al-Yaqin, Arabic for “the Faith Movement,” the group answers to a committee of Rohingya emigres in Mecca and a cadre of local commanders with experience fighting as guerrillas overseas. Its recent campaign – which continued into November with IED attacks and raids that killed several more security agents – has been endorsed by fatwas from clerics in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Emirates and elsewhere.

Rohingyas have “never been a radicalized population,” ICG notes, “and the majority of the community, its elders and religious leaders have previously eschewed violence as counterproductive.” But that is changing fast. Harakah al-Yaqin was established in 2012 after ethnic riots in Rakhine killed some 200 Rohingyas and is now estimated to have hundreds of trained fighters.

The military response to Harakah al-Yaqin is making Rohingya life even more desperate across northern Rakhine. The ICG cites “reports of suspects shot on sight, burning of many houses, looting of property and seizure or destruction of food stocks – as well as of women and girls raped.” Satellite photos show at least 1,500 buildings recently burned, while aid workers and journalists have been kept away. Some 30,000 Rohingyas are newly displaced.

Burma’s government is led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy icon and Nobel Peace laureate whose party swept last year’s landmark election, but she governs under a constitution imposed in 2008 by the old military junta. Its antidemocratic provisions bar her or any other elected official from controlling the military or the defense and border ministries, so last year’s election had little effect on the Rohingya. The government decision to disenfranchise all Rohingyas before the vote likely drove more recruits into the insurgents’ ranks.

Can Ms. Suu Kyi prevail on the military to exercise restraint and, in the longer term, begin bringing the stateless and desperate Rohingya into Burma’s national life? Does she want to? So far she’s done little beside speaking with foreign leaders and appointing former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to head a commission of inquiry. Without significant changes in state policy, Rakhine’s incipient insurgency could grow into a jihadist threat that spreads beyond Burma’s borders.