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Indonesia opts for pragmatism in addressing Rohingya crisis at UN Security Council
Indonesia has decided to focus its advocacy on the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh in Southeast Asia.
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This picture taken on June 11 and released by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP) shows a group of Rohingya Muslims sitting on the sand at the Tarutao Marine National Park on Rawi island, southern Thailand. A group of 65 Rohingya Muslims have been found on a shipwrecked boat off the coast of southern Thailand, Navy officials said on June 12 as authorities investigated whether they had been trafficked. (AFP/Handout / Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP))
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ix months into its membership at the United Nations Security Council, Indonesia has opted to take a pragmatic approach in handling the most pressing human rights crisis in its backyard amid disunity among the body’s member states.
The UNSC has largely been seen as impotent in protecting and saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims escaping persecution from Buddhist-majority Myanmar, which does not recognize them as citizens despite a long entrenched history in the country.
Some 740,000 fled to neighboring Bangladesh following a 2017 military crackdown that UN investigators say was carried out with “genocidal intent”. Myanmar has denied the allegations and rejected both the UN Human Rights Council’s independent investigative mechanism and the United Nations fact-finding mission.
Growing disunity among Security Council members has further prevented the refugee crisis from being discussed seriously, with China and Russia ready to wield their veto rights to scrap any earnest proposal to address the Myanmar issue.
“This disunity has already [taken hold in the past] but now it is becoming increasingly visible in all issues,” said Grata Endah Werdaningtyas, the Foreign Ministry's director for international security and disarmament. “There used to be some issues that we could still work on together, but that list is shrinking.”
The impasse comes in spite of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ painting of the refugee problem in 2018 as among the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights crises. At the leading body on international peace and security, the Rohingya crisis has only made it once onto the council’s official agenda this year, and without the issuance of a UNSC resolution.
But Indonesia’s approach has generally been on the pragmatic side, focusing on the most immediate action that it could take, Grata said.
