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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tankin, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I am speaking today with Dr. Simon Adams.
He is the Executive Director of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, and has been in that position since 2011. And we're speaking today about his piece, The Responsibility to Protect and Fate of the Rohingya. It's in Global Responsibility to Protect. Simon, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with me today.
Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. So, to start out, the name of this podcast is Humanities Matter, and I don't mean to sound callous or glib or dismissive with this question, and I know that it seems self-ident to you and to many others. But to start out, could you explain to our listeners a bit about why the fate of the Rohingya matters?
Yeah, sure, and I don't want to sound glib in my response either, but I think you don't need to be Jewish to think that the Holocaust was wrong. In the same way, I think you don't need to be a Rohingya to recognize that they are one of the most persecuted minorities on our planet, and that a genocide was committed against them between August 2017 and the end of that year, forcing over 700,000 ethnic Rohingya into Bangladesh, and not to mention the large numbers who were killed inside the country. And I think, you know, I come from an Irish immigrant family to Australia, and there's a saying in the Irish language that all human beings live in the shadow of one another, and I think that's fundamentally what the humanities is also about. It's about exploring our humanness.
It's about kind of determining the contours of the human condition, and I think that includes the evil that we do to one another. And so I think, you know, why should people be interested in the fate of the Rohingya because it's a story about humanity and about how we absolutely must do better? We haven't done better, though, and as you say, atrocities have to befall in a minority. And I guess my next question for you is on whom does blame for what has happened for what is happening in fall, or do you think that blame is kind of the wrong way to think about or frame this?
No, I think some blame can be apportioned to people. I think, you know, blame is also a legal concept, right? And I think in that sense, who's responsible for the genocide against the Rohingya? These things don't just happen in a vacuum.
You know, atrocities don't just happen out of nowhere. People don't just get up one morning and suddenly decide to murder their neighbors. These are things that need to be organized. These are things that need to be incited.
These are things that need to be prepared and orchestrated. And so I think in a very fundamental sense, primary responsibility for the crimes that have taken place lays with the security forces of Myanmar who planned this, who carried it out and who systematically persecuted and then killed the Rohingya and mass deportation of the Rohingya and all the other crimes that took place, which are kind of harrowing when you read accounts by survivors. In a secondary sense, I think there's the political leadership of Myanmar, including unsansushi herself, who, of course, is a former Nobel Peace Prize winner but has absolutely been an apologist for the military of Myanmar in this case and has not only willfully ignored what has been happening in the kind state, but has actually now become an apologist for those atrocities. And then I think thirdly, I think there's a broader responsibility of the international community, the UN Security Council, which did absolutely nothing in the aftermath of these atrocities, and those in the region who are being kind of silent accomplices to the crime.
And speaking of this, the context, right, in which this has occurred, you know, we're in this era in which you have various national leaders and they're so often talking about national sovereignty, respect for national sovereignty. I won't tell you what to do. Don't tell me what to do. You know, ex-country first.
How does this fit into that? Look, I mean, sovereignty is part of the international system and has been obviously for centuries, but, you know, I think the post-Rawanda debate, you know, after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 has really kind of, I think, settled in the minds of most people around the idea that somehow sovereignty is also a license to kill. You know, it's not a license to kill. I think we're beyond that in terms of the international community and how it regards these crimes.
And I think there's an overwhelming majority of people in the world and states in the world that believe that sovereignty entails responsibility and that the most fundamental of those responsibilities is a responsibility to protect vulnerable populations in your own country, whether you recognize them as citizens or not from crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide. My last question for you, you know, because we spoke about some of the failures of the international community, but you write about and then the piece about how certain UN member states got creative to try to protect the Rohingya or to try to improve the fate of the Rohingya. And I was hoping that to end on, if not an optimistic note, then a note of constructive action. Could you speak about some of those initiatives and whether you think that they will help with the improvement of the behavior of the Rohingya?
Yeah, I mean, there are states that have taken action in the aftermath of the genocide in 2017 and also largely due to the pressure from Rohingya communities themselves and from international civil society, human rights organizations, exposing the crimes, and pushing for it. And, you know, my own organization has played a small role in that as well. And I think, you know, what we would say is that the, you know, that there are states who implose targeted sanctions, there are states who cut military ties with Myanmar. I think Bangladesh has done an extraordinary job in terms of providing sanctuary for people who otherwise would have had nowhere to go and would have potentially died.
And let's not forget that the refugee camp at Cox Bazaar in Bangladesh is now the largest refugee camp in the world. But I think above all others, the one that I would single out is, you know, tiny nation of the Gambia in West Africa, which is actually the smallest nation in Africa, and has now taken a case to the international court of justice, a case which will actually hopefully hand down its first provisional measures on Thursday this week, and has taken Myanmar to the international court of justice for breaching its obligations under the genocide convention. And I think there was enormous pressure on them to not do that. Again, a small country, a developing country, but a country with a leadership that sees that it has something in common with ordinary people in Myanmar and feels that a tremendous injustice has been perpetrated and that it should do something to try and rectify that.
So, you know, I think in short, the international community failed to prevent the genocide from taking place. It failed to protect people when they needed it most, but it's never too late to punish the perpetrators and break the kind of the cycle of persecution inside the country. And I think that is fundamentally what my article was trying to grasp at. And I think that you articulated it successfully in that piece.
For our listeners, the piece is called the responsibility to protect and the fate of the Rohingya. It is published in Global Responsibility to Protect, and it's author and our guest today is Dr. Saffan Adams. Signing, really, thank you for recruiting the time.
Thank you guys so much.