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RI opts for pragmatism in addressing Rohingya crisis
Six months into its membership at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 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
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span>Six months into its membership at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 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 UN 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 AntÓnio 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. “Sometimes in the UN Security Council, when there is no common vision from the outset, [an issue] will not work no matter how we debate it,” she said on the sidelines of a discussion hosted by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia in Jakarta, on Thursday.
During its presidency of the Security Council in May, Indonesia did not bring up the refugee crisis but rather focused on the issue of UN peacekeeping, conducting two open debates about training UN peacekeepers and on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. “We must also be realistic from the outset; with the foundation that we have now, is it going to create any outcome?” said Grata.
In December, the UNSC had considered action to push Myanmar to work with the UN in addressing the Rohingya crisis, but China and Russia boycotted the talks on a British-drafted resolution, Reuters reports.
Echoing a previous remark by the Indonesian representative at the UN, Grata said the “nitty gritty” of diplomatic work toward resolving the crisis could be developed at the ASEAN level, where a work plan for Rohingya repatriation was currently being developed.
She said that if other countries wanted to make contributions to the effort, they were welcome to do so through ASEAN’s humanitarian response body, the AHA Center, which is in charge of the initiative. Indonesia views cooperation through the AHA Center and other parties such as the International Committee of the Red Cross to be the most pragmatic approach — at least for now.
Last month, ASEAN and the government of Myanmar agreed to take practical steps to alleviate the situation in Rakhine state, where the Rohingya ethnic community reside. The decision follows up on a preliminary needs assessment conducted by an AHA Center team in March, but the challenge of voluntarily repatriating the refugees still remains. Indonesia and Malaysia were the only ASEAN member states to raise the need to consult the refugees on repatriation during an ASEAN Summit in Bangkok, Thailand last week.
The crisis is a cause for concern not only for Bangladesh but also the surrounding region. More and more Rohingya are returning to the seas to escape persecution in Myanmar, retracing the migration route of the 2015 crisis in which hundreds of people of the ethnic minority fled across the Andaman Sea and the Strait of Malacca after raids on human trafficking routes.
“Indonesia is also one of the destinations of these refugees, and this raises concerns about domestic security,” said Teuku Rezasyah, an international relations expert from Padjadjaran University in Bandung, West Java.
