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Human rights aspect ‘key’ to handling Rakhine crisis
A human rights perspective is needed in ASEAN’s collective response to the refugee crisis in Myanmar, a member of Southeast Asia’s human rights body has said, after a collective move to shift responsibility to an emergency response agency has yet to show significant progress six months after it was appointed to assist in Rakhine state
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span>A human rights perspective is needed in ASEAN’s collective response to the refugee crisis in Myanmar, a member of Southeast Asia’s human rights body has said, after a collective move to shift responsibility to an emergency response agency has yet to show significant progress six months after it was appointed to assist in Rakhine state.
The state was where Myanmar’s military cracked down on insurgencies in 2017, driving out 730,000 Rohingya Muslims, a minority in Rakhine that is denied citizenship and lives in apartheid-like conditions.
During the ASEAN Summit in Singapore in November, the region’s leaders agreed to appoint the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Center) as the group’s focal point for handling the crisis.
This decision resulted in talks to expand the mandate of the AHA Center beyond its traditional scope of disaster mitigation, while discounting the human rights aspect for fear of exacerbating sensitive sectarian tensions in the Buddhist-majority country.
But human rights should be inseparable from any effort to resolve the refugee crisis, said Yuyun Wahyuningrum, Indonesia’s representative to the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), arguing that its inclusion would save time, energy and money in the repatriation process. ”A safe, dignified, voluntary and sustainable repatriation can only be achieved when we respect human rights,” she told The Jakarta Post this week.
Myanmar, the ASEAN Secretariat and the AHA Center had agreed to update the latter’s Terms of Reference to help prepare for the repatriation of Rohingya who had fled across the border into Bangladesh and have since been housed in refugee camps.
The AHA Center was tasked with establishing a receiving center and a place of transit for refugees, and to oversee a team to be deployed to Rakhine for the entire year.
In March, the agency’s Emergency Response and Assessment Team had conducted a preliminary needs assessment on the repatriation efforts, but the report itself has yet to surface. The AHA Center was not available for comment.
Even in a wider scope, the AICHR has had a limited role in the crisis, as representatives failed to reach a consensus to even convene emergency meetings. “Later and more comprehensive assessments may benefit from a human rights perspective, and the only human rights body in ASEAN is the AICHR,” Yuyun said.
To its credit, the AICHR agreed last week to invite the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR, to a briefing by the AHA Center on the latest situation in Rakhine.
AICHR representatives from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore had also met with members of the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar earlier this month.
Critics have long been wary of the way the Rohingya crisis has been handled.
“From the beginning we have requested the involvement of the AICHR in the drafting of assessment indicators and in the assessment process itself, but for some reason they were not involved,” said Rachel Arinii, program manager for Forum-Asia, a consortium of Asian civil society groups.
Indonesia’s former representative to the AICHR, Dinna Wisnu, also lamented the lack of meaningful progress in the past few months. “We all know that until the rights of the minority group is guaranteed by the authority of Myanmar and the perpetrators brought to justice, the condition of the minority remains at high risk,” she said on Thursday.
Rights advocates also recently warned the World Bank that its proposed US$100 million development project for Rakhine could worsen tensions there, although the bank said it had raised concerns with Naypyidaw about the treatment of the Rohingya, Reuters reports. (tjs)
