Myanmar's Democratic Transition: What does it mean for the persecuted Rohingya people?

8/17/2019 Myanmar's Democratic Transition: What does it mean for the persecuted Rohingya people?

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MyanMar’s DeMocratic transitionWhat does that mean

for the Persecuted RohingyaPeople ???

One-Day Open Research Conference 11 May 2016

Hosted by South Asia Research Cluster,The University of Oxford

With generous support from grassroots activists, Rohingyarefugees and volunteers


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New York Times

THE PROGRAMMEMyanmar’s Democratic Transition:

What does that mean for the Persecuted Rohingya?

One-Day Open Research Conference, the University of Oxford

Most sessions will be webcast LIVE at

http://live.oxfordvideostreaming.co.uk/myanmarspersecutedrohingya.html

Date: 11 May 2016 (8:30 am – 4:30 pm)

Venue: Leonard Auditorium, Wolfson College, Linton Rd, Oxford, OX2 6UD

https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/

Contact: Dr Maung Zarni, Organizer, at [email protected]

or UK mobile on +44 771 (0)47 3322

http://live.oxfordvideostreaming.co.uk/myanmarspersecutedrohingya.htmlhttp://live.oxfordvideostreaming.co.uk/myanmarspersecutedrohingya.htmlhttps://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/http://live.oxfordvideostreaming.co.uk/myanmarspersecutedrohingya.html


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Objectives: To bring together researchers and practitioners in international law,history, public health, sociology, politics and economics as well as

Rohingya human rights defenders:1. to scrutinise and debate the meanings of the terms genocide,

persecution, democratisation and their relationships in theory and inhistory;

2. to continue shining a critical spotlight of university and independentresearch onto what is increasingly recognized as Myanmar’s slowgenocide of the Rohingya not only by international genocide and legalscholars but by world icons such as George Soros, Desmond Tutu,Mairead Maguire, Amartya Sen, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, and

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman.3. to call attention to recent research into the deplorable humanconditions under which over 1 million Rohingya live in ‘vast openprisons’ (i.e., Rohingya villages and towns) and Internally DisplacedPersons (IDP) camps, which the New York Times has called “the 21stcentury concentration camps”;

4. to present evidence to convince Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyigovernment that the end of decades-long state persecution of theRohingya minority should be a top priority; and

5. to brainstorm critical and constructive ideas which may enable

Myanmar’s democrats to remove one of the greatest obstacles togenuine democratization – the continued destruction of a largecommunity of people because of their distinct ethnic identity

CONFERENCE AGENDA

Conference Host ’s Welcome 8:30 am -8:35 am

Emeritus Professor Barbara Harriss-White , Co-ordinator, SARC, WolfsonCollege

Introduction 8:35 am – 8:40 am

Dr Maung Zarni , Research Fellow, The Sleuk Rith Institute, Cambodia &the author of “ Why do Burmese Generals reform? Or do they?” (forthcoming, Yale University Press)

1ST MORNING SESSION (8:40 am – 9:25 am including 10-minutes foreach speaker, with 15 min. of Q & A)


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On History and Politics of Identity

Chair: Emeritus Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond , Founder, RefugeesStudies Centre, Oxford University & Director, Fahamu RefugeeProgramme, Oxford

Daw Khin Hla , a Rohingya refugee and former middle school teacher fromRakhine or Arakan State

On Being A Rohingya in Myanmar

Professor Michael Charney , Professor of Asian and Military History,Department of History , School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), U.of London,

State and Society in Arakan since the Fourteenth Century: From Inclusion toPolarisation and Exclusion

Maung Bo Bo , PhD Candidate from Myanmar, Department of History,SOAS

Rohingya identity and presence in Arakan, according to Burma’s OfficialSources

2nd MORNING SESSION (9:30 am - 10:15 am, 10 minutes for eachspeaker, followed by 15 minutes of Q & A)

Public Health, Exploitation, and Human Trafficking


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Chair – Professor Shapan Adnan, Associate, Contemporary South AsianStudies Programme, Oxford University & Former Associate Professor ofSociology at the National University of Singapore and Professor at the

University of Chittagong, BangladeshDr S. Saad Mahmood , MD, Lecturer, Harvard University School ofMedicine, Boston, USA, Public Health Situation of the Rohingya: Findings

from a Harvard Study

Dr Ambia Perveen , MD, Consultant Paediatrician at Sankt MarienHospital in Dueren, Germany and Rohingya activist with the EuropeanRohingya Council, Myanmar’s Denial of Public Health Services to theRohingya


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Matthew Smith , Executive Director, Fortify Rights, International Crimes inRakhine State: Prevention and Accountability ( pre-recorded presentation

for the conference ).

TEA/COFFEE BREAK 10:15 AM – 10:45 AM

3RD MORNING SESSION (10:45 am to 11:30 am, 10 minutes for eachspeaker, followed by 15-minutes of Q and A)

Myanmar’s Policy and Practices of Rohingya Persecution

Chair, Professor Daniel Feierstein ,

past President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (2013-15) & Director, Centro de Estudios Sobre at the National University ofArgentina and author of Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing SocietyUnder the Nazis and Argentina's Military Juntas (Rutgers University Press,2014)

Dr Nancy Hudson-Rodd , Honorary Fellow, Tasmania Asia Institute,Australia Rohingya Genocide: International Complicity in Burma’s InternalViolence

Professor Penny Green and Thomas MacManus , co-authors of the 2015

report Genocide in Myanmar: Annihilation of the Rohingya , InternationalState Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London

Dr Maung Zarni , co-author (with Alice Cowley), ‘ The Slow BurningGenocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar ’ , Pacific Law and Policy Journal, (2014)


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KEYNOTE ADDRESS 11:30 am – 12:10 am

(30-minute keynote followed by 15 minutes of Q and A)

Chair – Emeritus Professor Barbara Harriss-White

Why The World Must Listen to the Rohingyas

by

Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

University Professor, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society,Columbia University and a Founding Member of Post-Colonial Studies

LUNCH, Haldane Room, Wolfson College (12:15 pm – 1:15 pm)

1ST AFTERNOON SESSION (1:15 pm – 1:25 pm)

The Slow Genocide of the Rohingya

A presentation by

Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics (1998)videotaped at Harvard in November 2014.


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Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Philosophy andEconomics, Harvard University.

2ND AFTERNOON SPECIAL SESSION

(1:25 pm – 2:10 pm, 20-minutes roundtable followed by 25 minutes ofQ and A)

Genocide Roundtable:

The Politics of the United Nations, International Human Rights andSociology of Genocide

Chair – Professor Penny Green , Professor of Law and Globalization &Director, International State Crime Research Initiative, Queen MaryUniversity of London

Professor Daniel Feierstein , past President of the International

Association of Genocide Scholars (2013-15) & Director, Centro de EstudiosSobre at the National University of Argentina and author of Genocide asSocial Practice: Reorganizing Society Under the Nazis and Argentina'sMilitary Juntas (Rutgers University Press, 2014)

Tomas Ojea Quintana , Human Rights Lawyer & former UN SpecialRapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, (2008-2014)

3RD AFTERNOON SESSION (2:15 pm – 3:00 pm including 15 minutes

of Discussions)


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Rohingya Persecution, External Players and Perspectives

Chair – Dr Maung Zarni, Sleuk Rith Institute, Cambodia

Professor Shapan Adnan, Associate, Contemporary South Asian Studies

Programme, Oxford University & Former Associate Professor, NationalUniversity of Singapore (NUS) & Professor, University of Chittagong,Bangladesh

Azril Mohd Amin, Lawyer & Chief Executive , Centre for Human RightsResearch & Advocacy (CENTHRA), Malaysia

Adnin Armas, Coalition of Indonesian Community for Caring Rohingya,Acheh, Indonesia

Dr Azeem Ibrahim, Rothermere American Institute Fellow, OxfordUniversity and author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s HiddenGenocide (Hurst, 2016).

COFFEE/TEA BREAK (3:00 pm – 3:30 pm)

A Special Presentation by Professor Maya Tudor – 3:30 pm – 3:45 pm

Reflections on Comparative Ethnic Nationalisms , Associate Professor ofPolitics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, OxfordUniversity and an international observer with the Carter Centre inMyanmar during the November election 2015

CLOSING AFTERNOON SESSION (3: 45 pm – 4:30 pm)

What can the international community do to end theRohingya persecution?

Chair – Mark Farmaner , Director, Burma Campaign-UK

Tun Khin , President, Burmese Rohingya Association UK

Nurul Islam , Rohingya Lawyer and Human Rights Activist, UK

Dr Hla Kyaw , Rohingya Medical Doctor & Activist (European RohingyaCouncil)


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Speakers Biographies and Abstracts/Summaries of Presentations

Shapan Adnan

Shapan Adnan obtained a BA (Honours) degree in Economics from the University ofSussex and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University ofCambridge. He is currently an independent scholar based in the UK. He hasformerly taught at the National University of Singapore as well as the Universitiesof Dhaka and Chittagong. Shapan Adnan has been a visiting research fellow at theUniversity of Oxford and is currently an Associate of its Contemporary South AsianStudies Programme (CSASP). He is a member of the international advisory board ofthe Journal of Peasant Studies and the Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission. Thesubjects of his research and publications extend across political economy,sociology, anthropology and development. He has undertaken fieldwork in areas ofBangladesh bordering Arakan state of Myanmar, including the Chittagong Hill

Tracts and Cox’s Bazar district where most of the Rohingya refugees are located

The Invisible Refugees: Rohingyas from Myanmar in Bangladesh (Abstract) – byProf. Shapan Adnan

Rohingya Muslims in north Arakan of Myanmar have been subjected to persecutionby the state and the majority Buddhist ethnic groups, resulting in their repeatedexodus to Bangladesh. Despite being international refugees, the bulk of theRohingyas do not live in the small official and unofficial camps. Instead, they havemerged into the interstices of the host society becoming, so to speak, ‘invisiblerefugees’. However, recent events in Myanmar and Bangladesh, including desperate

journeys by Rohingya boat people seeking shelter in Southeast Asia andAustralasia, have eventually caught the attention of international policy-makersand the media, making them visible under limiting conditions of starvation,abduction, trafficking, extortion and, frequently, death.

However, even though escaping from brutal persecution in Myanmar, the plight ofthe Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh has not been free of insecurity and danger,being constantly overshadowed by the fear of arrest and deportation. Those arrivingfrom the Arakan after 1992 have been denied official recognition as refugees, andformally restricted from seeking employment. Consequently, refugee men andwomen have had little option but to violate these restrictions and devise strategiesfor survival. In order to meet subsistence needs through wage work and self-employment, they have accepted lower wages/prices and poorer job conditions,compared to workers from the host community. For security, they have becomeclients of powerful patrons who can also provide them with some degree ofprotection from arrest and deportation by security forces. The refugees have soughtvoter registration and national ID cards so as to be included in the electoral roll, asstepping stones towards gaining Bangladeshi citizenship and obtaining passports.

These processes have been accompanied by chain migration and communityformation, as earlier migrants have helped and guided new arrivals from the

Arakan linked by kinship and village-based ties.


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Nonetheless, such achievements of the Rohingya refugees have been precariousand vulnerable to unfavourable factors and hostile reactions of economic andpolitical interests adversely affected by their presence and activities. Sections of thelocal labour force have resented being undercut by the refugees in labour andproduct/service markets and sought to ban them from certain jobs and activities

such as rickshaw-pulling and industrial work. Official restrictions have beenimposed on women wanting to participate in micro-credit programmes and childrenseeking enrolment in government schools. Around 100,000 Rohingyas had theiracquired voter IDs cancelled during systematic checks by the military in 2007-08,automatically leading to their exclusion from electoral rolls and ending prospects ofgaining citizenship. Anti-immigrant campaigns were drummed up by sections of thenational power structure and local media during the early 2010s, with somequarters calling for their expulsion. With Bangladesh’s increasing unwillingness toshelter the Rohingya refugees permanently, their situation as a stateless people hasworsened. Even though such rejection was a critical factor impelling Rohingya ‘boatpeople’ to seek shelter in third countries, they were rebuffed in most cases by thegovernments of Southeast Asia and Australia.

Azril Mohd Amin

Azril Mohd Amin is a Kuala Lumpur-based lawyer and a human rights campaigner.He co-founded the Centre for Human Rights Research & Advocacy (CENTHRA) in2014 and had since spent much of his time establishing triadic relationships forCENTHRA, domestically and internationally. Azril became interested in the plightof refugees while working to secure access to health and education for Rohingyan,Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Malaysia and Indonesia since 2010.

A brief summary of Amin’s presentation

I shall first touch briefly on Malaysia’s views on the Burmese state’s treatment ofRohingyas, followed by ASEAN’s views on the same. I shall also provide CENTHRA’sperspective on Malaysia and ASEAN policies on such treatments, in particular,whether it is apt to regard it as a simple problem of human trafficking instead of,as I shall argue, a slow genocide.

Adnin Armas

Adnin Armas graduated in Philosophy in International Islamic University Malaysia,1997. He holds a M.A degree in Islamic Thought from the International Institute ofIslamic Thought and Civilization-International Islamic University Malaysia in 2003.He writes articles and a few books on Islam and its Challenges in Indonesia. He isthe editor – in-chief in a magazine, published monthly in Indonesia. He is thechairman of Indonesian Society Coalition Caring for Rohingya.

I will talk about the stateless Rohingya in Indonesia. Some challenges andrecommendations to overcome them.


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Maung Bo Bo

A Burmese native, Bo attended the Institute of Medicine where he earned aM.B.B.S. More passionate about politics and literature, he spent his teenage yearsin his family collection of Burmese books. Bo is a fourth generation writer from a

renowned literary family with a very strong progressive view, which has facedpersecution under successive military regimes. His maternal grandparents, Ludu UHla and Daw Ahmar, were Leftist comrades of the late Aung San, Aung San SuuKyi's martyred father, and other nationalist leaders and founded anti-colonial

journals such as Kyipwaye (Progress) and Ludu (People) since the 1920's. Bo hasbeen writing for Burmese publications for almost 20 years, covering politics andhistory of Burma. Bo holds a MA in history from SOAS and is currently workingon his PhD on the Burmese military propaganda in Burma, from the early ColdWar period till 1962 when the military led by General Ne Win seized state powerand ended the country’s experiment with parliamentary democracy.

Rohingya from Burmese official records (Abstract) - Maung Bo Bo

Rohingya is the most contested identity in contemporary Burma where dozens ofethnic identities have emerged throughout its complex history. A British traveller’srecord mentioned Rooinga at the end of the 18th century, as 'one of the nativegroups of Arakan" who were Muslims (Mohammadens).

Upon independence from Britain, the name Rohingya re-emerged in the Burmeseofficial and public discourses, particularly in the 1950's, as Arakanese Muslimleaders chose to identify themselves the Rohingya. The leaders of the Burma

Armed Forces and the post-independence civilian governments accepted theRohingya's choice of their own group identity. As a result, the Rohingya came to beofficially recognized by the state in Burma. The government set up a Rohingyalanguage service, alongside 3 other native languages of Burma, and, in 1961 beganbroadcasting the Rohingya program 3 times a week on the country's sole nationalradio station called Burma Broadcasting Service (BBS). The program wasterminated 2 years after the military took power. But all these developments fellback in 1978 when the military socialist government launched an operation totackle war refugees from Bangladesh. Increasingly Burma's Rohingya populationfaced greater restrictions as the state was stripping them of citizen rights. Theplight of the Rohingya became worse after 1988 when the military intelligence

service launched Islamophobic propaganda campaigns in general and stepped upthe persecution of the Rohingya amidst international outcry. Burma's successivemilitary leaderships since Ne Win have denied that the Rohingya were a part of thecountry. Very recently,the Foreign Ministry, headed by the Nobel Peace LaureateAung San Suu Kyi, "requested" US Government not to use the term "Rohingya.Foreign Ministry spokesperson confirmed that it was the policy of Daw Aung SanSuu Kyi not to recognize the term.

I use primary official sources as well as academic records to argue that the termRohingya in Burma had been officially used by the central governments.


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Michael W. Charney

Michael W. Charney is Professor of Asian and Military History at SOAS, TheUniversity of London, where he joined the faculty in 2001 after completing a PhDdissertation on early modern Arakan at the University of Michigan in 1999 and a

two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the National University of Singapore(1999-2001). He has published monographs on warfare in the premodern SouthEast Asian region (Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900, 2004), the rise ofmonastic, military, and ministerial elites and their impact on the religious andintellectual life of the precolonial Burmese kingdom (Powerful Learning: BuddhistLiterati and the Throne in Burma's Last Dynasty, 1752-1885, 2006), and a historyof the twentieth century in Burma before and during the lengthy period of militaryrule (A History of Modern Burma, 2009). His most recent work focuses on the roleof railways in war, premodern warfare across the Indian Ocean world, and SouthEast Asia during the Cold War.

State and Society in Arakan since the Fourteenth Century: From Inclusion toPolarisation and Exclusion (Abstract) - Michael W. Charney

Arakan today is being depicted very much like any other part of lowland Myanmar,part of a nation-state that today emphasises a Burman, Theravada Buddhistreligious, cultural and political heritage that has dominated the Irrawaddy Valleyfrom the classical period. Archaeological sites, texts, and other sources are beingremade or expunged to develop a historical record that emphasises anunchallenged cultural and religious homogeneity to the region — Arakan as part ofa greater Burma —is an imaginary that has eased Arakan’s integration into theMyanmar nation-state but has simultaneously undermined Arakanese society itselfand miscast an area of movement, inclusion, and immigration into one of stasis,exclusion, and closure. This short presentation highlights some of the majorelements of this change, from a religious and culturally heterogeneous immigrantsociety on the crossroads of Bengal and Burma to one that has been mis-imaginedby some as a sort of Theravada Buddhist Burman nativist bastion on the frontiersof the Muslim world.

Daniel Feierstein

Professor Feierstein is a renowned genocide scholar, and his books and articles

have been critical in the qualification of the crimes committed in Argentina asgenocide, established by 9 different tribunals from 2006 on.

Professor Daniel Feierstein is a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and a senior lecturer at the NationalUniversity of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), and the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).He directs the UNTREF Centre for Genocide Studies, the first Genocide StudiesResearch Center in Latin America, founded in 2007. He was also the founder of theGenocide Chair at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in 2001.

Professor Feierstein is the author of several books on genocide, including: StateViolence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years (co-edited with MarciaEsparza, Henry R. Huttenbach); Sobre la elaboración del genocidio. Memorias yRepresentaciones (Working through Genocide: Memories and Representations,


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2012); Sobre la elaboración del genocidio II: Juicios (Working through Genocide II: Judgments, 2015); Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society Under Nazismand Argentina´s Military Juntas, 2014; Hasta que la muerte nos separe, 2005;Genocidio: La administración de la muerte en la modernidad, 2004; and Seisestudios sobre genocidio, 2000.

His conceptual work on genocide was central to the development of Queen MaryUniversity of London International State Crime Initiative’s research on the genocideof the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Professor Feierstein previously served as the President of the InternationalAssociation of Genocide Scholars (2013-2015), and has been a consultant for theUnited Nations on a number of projects on Human Rights. He was a Judge invarious sessions of the Permanent People´s Tribunal dealing with the cases of SriLanka (2010 and 2012) and Mexico (2014), among others.

Genocide as a Social Practice (Abstract) - Daniel Feierstein

This lecture will move beyond the common conception of genocide as mass killing,developing instead an understanding of the phenomenon as a technology of power.

Through the ‘machinery’ of networks of concentration camps, distributedthroughout the whole of society, terror spreads betrayal and mistrust in order tobreak the solidarity and reciprocity necessary to create and reinforce social ties.

Drawing on some of the crucial insights of Raphael Lemkin (the Polish Jewishlawyer who invented the term “genocide”), Professor Feierstein will discuss how andwhy genocide can be usefully understood as a tool to destroy, transform andreorganise collective identities. The focus on the destruction of identities as themain objective of genocide instead of analyzing only the process of annihilation, is atool to comprehend the long-term consequences of genocide in a whole society. Thelecture will develop the different stages of the genocidal process from thestigmatization of a group, through the harassment, isolation, systematic weakeningand annihilation and the different ways of symbolical enactment of theconsequences of the terror in the whole society in which genocide happened.

Penny Green

Professor Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen MaryUniversity of London, UK, and Founder and Director of the International StateCrime Initiative (ISCI), UK. She joined Queen Mary University in September 2014following eight years as Professor o f Law and Criminology at King’s College London.Professor Green has published widely on state crime, resistance to state violence,the genocide of Burma's natural disasters, Turkish criminal justice and politics,transnational crime and asylum and forced migration.

She is, with Thomas MacManus and Alicia de la Cour Venning, the author ofCountdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (2015)


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Barbara Harrell-Bond

Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE, Emerata Professor and Associate, is a legalanthropologist who founded/directed the Refugee Studies Centre (1982-96).Previously she was conducting research in West Africa from 1967-1982, while

employed by the Departments of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh &University of Illinois-Urbana,USA, the Afrika Studiecentrum, Leiden, Holland, & theFaculty of Law, University of Warwick. On retirement from the RSC, she conductedresearch in Kenya and Uganda (1997-2000), and was Honorary Adjunct Professor,American University in Cairo (2000-2008). Barbara is also an awardee of the FranzBoas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology awarded by the AmericanAnthropologist Association, and was awarded the Lucy Mair medal for appliedanthropology in 2014. She is now responsible for the information portal,www.refugeelegalaidinformation.org that promotes legal assistance for refugeesaround the world.

Barbara Harriss-White

Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies , OxfordUniversity and Emeritus Fellow and Co-ordinator South Asia Research Cluster,Wolfson College, Oxford. A working lifetime’s experience of teaching andresearching the political economy of South Asia through fieldwork, focussing onrural development, the informal economy, India’s capitalist transformations andaspects of poverty and deprivation. Current research is on waste and on naturalresource crimes.

Daw Khin Hla

Daw Khin Hla was born in 1953 in predominantly Rohingya region calledButhidaung Township in Arakan State, now known as Rakhine State of Myanmar.Her extended family included distinguished public servants and politicians whoserved in high offices both pre- and post-independence Burma. Her grand-father-in-law, Sultan Ahmed, served as a prominent MP in General Aung San’sConstituent Assembly in 1947. She herself worked in the Ministry of Education asa middle school teacher for more than 20 years. She and her husband, a townshipofficer in the Ministry of Cooperatives survived the first wave of persecution againstthe Rohingya by the military government of General Ne Win in 1979.Subsequently, they decided to leave Burma. Her immediate family are nowscattered on 3 different continents: N. America, Europe and Australia. She livesin East London now.

She will discuss her first hand experience of being a persecuted Rohingya.

http://www.refugeelegalaidinformation.org/http://www.refugeelegalaidinformation.org/http://www.refugeelegalaidinformation.org/


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Dr Nancy Hudson-Rodd

Dr Nancy Hudson- Rodd (PhD Université d’ Ottawa), human geographer, formerDirector Centre of Development Studies, Edit Cowan University, Western Australia,University Associate School of Land and Food University of Tasmania, discipline

geography, affiliated with the Asia Institute University Tasmania has conductedresearch in and on Burma for over a decade on arbitrary confisca tion of farmers’land.

She will discuss critically the international complicity in Bu rma’s brutal internalviolence.

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

Azeem Ibrahim is an RAI Fellow at Mansfield College, University of Oxford andResearch Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. Hecompleted his PhD from the University of Cambridge and served as an

International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard anda World Fellow at Yale. Over the years he has met and advised numerous worldleaders on policy development and was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by theEuropean Social Think Tank in 2010 and a Young Global Leader by the WorldEconomic Forum. He tweets @AzeemIbrahim

Nurul Islam

Nurul Islam was born in 1948 in northern Arakan/Rakhine State of Myanmar. Hestudied law in Rangoon and London. He has long been involved in Rohingya

movement for the restoration of their rights and freedom in Myanmar. He has beenliving in the U.K. since 2004. Nurul Islam is the current Chairman of the ArakanRohingya National Organisation (ARNO), which is committed to pursuing a peacefulpolitical settlement of the Rohingya problem exploring all available avenues.

Summary of presentation by Nurul Islam at Oxford on 11 May 2016

Rohingya are being destroyed due to intolerant state policies and systematicpersecution. They have been rejected the right to exist in Myanmar. Since 2012,series of state sponsored genocidal onslaughts were carried out against them andother Muslims. Even the word “Rohingya” is blacklisted and not mentionable in thecountry.

Despite democratic transitions, Rohingyas were excluded from 2014 UN sponsorednational census; their National Registration Cards (NRCs) and IDs were seized andinvalidated depriving them of voting rights and continue to be denied their legalright to citizenship. Even NLD did not choose Muslim candidates as MPs. The Nazi-like extremist Buddhist movements like 969 and Ma Ba Tha are doing colossaldamages to the Muslims.

Over 140,000 Rohingyas are still confined in squalid segregated semi-concentrationcamps. In her 18 March report, Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee called upon theNLD "to take immediate steps to put an end to the highly discriminatory

policies and practices against the Rohingya and other Muslim communities. On 23March the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution urging the Myanmar


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government to repeal discriminatory legislative and policy measures, to liftrestrictions on movement, and to intensify its efforts to address discrimination.According to legal experts, Rohingya are facing ‘slow but sure genocide’. Now theNLD government has an opportunity to improve the plight of the Rohingya, buthelping the Rohingya is not its priority.

The NLD government must uphold their ‘Responsibility to Protect’ R ohingya and allpopulation, and hold accountable all perpetrators of human rights, including thosewho have incited ethnic and religious intolerance and violence. It should abolishthe bias Rakhine Action Plan and end institutionalized discrimination againstRohingya. It must allow unhindered humanitarian assistance to the needy peoplein Rakhine state, and facilitate the safe and voluntary return of IDPs to theircommunities, and must demonstrably improve the welfare of the Rohingya andother ethnic and religious minorities. It must repeal 1982 Myanmar CitizenshipLaw or amend it to conform to international human rights law and citizenshipstandards and restore their citizenship and ethnic rights. The newgovernment's reform process must include constitutional reform thataddresses the needs of ethnic minorities, as well as the development of anindependent judiciary. The international community should urge the government todevelop a comprehensive reconciliation plan, including establishing a ‘com missionof inquiry’ into crimes committed against the Rohingya; and neighbouring countriesshould offer protection and assistance to Rohingya asylum seekers.

Dr Hla Kyaw

Dr. Hla Kyaw is born and raised in Maung Daw, Rakhine state, where thousands ofRohingya have been persecuting on daily basis. After finishing high school inMaung Daw, he was fortunate enough to be allowed to study Medicine in theUniversity of Medicine, Magwe, Myanmar. He graduated as a Medical doctor in2007. He left the persecution in 2010, and currently living and working in exile inAmsterdam, the Netherlands.

The Rohingya Genocide: slow in nature and worse than previous ones, and whatcould be done (Abstract) - Dr Hla Kyaw

We are suffering from no less a crime other than what Dr. Zarni et al. described asa slow-burning genocide. As a victim of the genocide, I have a feeling that thegenocide we are suffering from is worse than the previous ones in the sense that: a)It is slow in nature; therefore, there is victims’ psychological adapt ation of thesuffering giving the perpetrators a chance to advance “the genocide agenda”without a serious resistant from the victims. It is like people in the prison with bar(physical prison) compared to people in the prison without bar (mental prison).People in the prison without bar see their prison-hood, and would be serious toliberate themselves by any means necessary, while the people in the mental prisonare unaware of their prison-hood, and therefore would not be serious enough fortheir liberation; b) It is slow in nature; therefore, no external power is serious for

the victims' liberation from genocide although external power is well aware of theseriousness of the suffering; c) Complete silence from the fellow citizens (including


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politicians, scholars and ordinary citizens) of the country. Decades-long militarypsychological warfare (propaganda)--Bangalization of Rohingya-- makes fellowBurmese citizens (different ethnic groups) including Daw Aung San Su Kyi (DASSK)to psychologically justify genocide of Rohingya. Consequently, Rohingya becomefriendless from within. Therefore, we are totally friendless from within Burmese

society. d) DASS’s, democratic icon, the Western powers darling, denial of right ofRohingya to self-identify. To the best of my knowledge, genocide cannot be stoppedwithout external intervention (fitted ones with the context), and external powers areshowing no signs of seriousness. Therefore, we (scholars, researchers, and moreimportantly journalists) need a global move – like international BDS movement -- topush, to make them feel obliged to act or shame external powers includingcorporations for their inactions to stop slow-genocide. We need to harnessinternational solidarity from global citizens like Palestinian activists are doing.Capacity building to the Rohingya activists would certainly help to professionallyexpress, write and report their sufferings to the global community, which woulddraw international solidarity that could move global power to act. Organizing well-done research conference on Rohingya Genocide like today will surely shakes globalactor. Finally giving scholarly pressure to the current government esp. DASSKcould be of important.

Dr S. Saad Mahmood

As a physician with training in public health, Saad works with Zakat Foundation ofIndia in its response to natural disasters and 'complex emergencies' in India. Hehas provided medical care at, and also fundraised for, a UN supported Rohingyarefugee camp in New Delhi run by Zakat Foundation. His research on the healthstatus of the Rohingya will be published later this year.

Saad is a physician at Harvard Medical School, Boston and is completing afellowship in Cardio-oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He graduatedfrom the Internal Medicine program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior tocoming to Boston, he completed his medical degree, public health degree andundergraduate degree from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.

Dr S. Saad Mahmood's talk will focus on the health status of the Rohingya viasummation of the available data on this vulnerable population.

Thomas MacManus

Dr Thomas MacManus is a Postdoctural Research Fellow at ISCI and is based atQueen Mary University of London’s School of Law. He holds a BA (Hons) in Law andAccounting from the University of Limerick (2002), an LLM (with Distinction) inInternational Law from the University of Westminster (2005) and a PhD in Law &Criminology from King’s College London (2011). MacManus was admitted to theNew York State Bar in 2004 and the Role of Solicitors of Ireland in 2008. Followingthree months of data collection in Burma/Myanmar in 2014/15, MacManus co-authored the ISCI Report on the situation facing the Rohingya - COUNTDOWN TOANNIHILATION: GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR.

MacManus will present and elaborate on elements of this report, which analysesthe persecution of the Rohingya against the six stages of genocide outlined by


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Daniel Feierstein. The report concludes that the Rohingya have suffered the firstfour of the six stages of genocide.

Ro Shwe Maung

A mechanical engineer by training, Ro Shwe Maung was born and raised in thepredominantly Rohingya region of Northern Arakan or Rakhine, Myanmar. Hewas elected to Myanmar parliament in 2010 representing ButhidaungConstituency, Rakhine State. As an MP he served as a member of Reform andModernization Assessment Committee of Pyithu Hluttaw and of Land ConfiscationReview Committee of Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (Union Parliament) until his resignationin 2015. Shwe Maung is Founder and President of AiPAD (Arakan Institute forPeace and Development), Board Member of APHR (ASEAN Parliamentarians forHuman Rights) (www.aseanmp.org) and Founding Member of IPPFoRB(International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief(www.ippforb.com). He is currently exiled in the United States.

Some concrete ideas for ending Myanmar’s Persecution of the Rohin gya: Summary -by Ro Shwe maung

Ex-MP Ro Shwe Maung will share his eye-witness account of the destruction ofwhole Rohingya and Kaman Muslim neighborhoods in June 2012 and suggestsconcrete steps that the Aung San Suu Kyi government need to take to endMya nmar’s Rohingya genocide including stopping all forms of persecution andhuman rights violations against Rohingya minority, releasing all Rohingya PoliticalPrisoners, falsely imprisoned after the 2012 violence, resettle 140,000 Rohingya

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to their original house land and endingsegregration between Rakhine and Rohingya Communities.

Dr Ambia Perveen

Dr Ambia Perveen, MD, consultant pediatrician at Sankt Marien Hospital inDueren, Germany. Dr Perveen is a longstanding Rohingya activist, and lobbymember of the European Rohingya Council.

Dr Perveen will discuss her work on the vulnerabilities prevalent among theRohingya populations in terms of public health.

Tomas Ojea Quintana

Tomas Ojea Quintana is an Argentine Lawyer who worked at the Inter-AmericanCommission of Human Rights (OAS) and studied international human rights law(LLM) at American University USA. He was human rights consultant for theInteramerican Development Bank. He also worked as international consultant forthe UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bolivia. He was special adviser tothe Argentine Secretariat of Human Rights. He then worked as an attorney for the

argentine NGO "Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo", as consultant on sexual andreproductive rights, and as adviser for the Human Rights Committee in Argentine


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Congress. He was Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in Myanmar(2008-2014). He taught human rights law at University of Buenos Aires, atUniversity for Peace in Costa Rican, and at the Diplomat Institute in Argentina

His presentation will address the question: “Is the UN really convinced thatRohingyas are the most persecuted minority in the world?”

Amartya Sen (Pre-recorded presenter)

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor ofEconomics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until 2004 the Master of

Trinity College, Cambridge. He is also Senior Fellow at the Harvard Society ofFellows. Earlier on he was Professor of Economics at Jadavpur UniversityCalcutta, the Delhi School of Economics, and the London School of Economics, andDrummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University.

Amartya Sen has served as President of the Econometric Society, the AmericanEconomic Association, the Indian Economic Association, and the InternationalEconomic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is nowits Honorary Advisor. His research has ranged over social choice theory, economictheory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, theory of measurement,decision theory, development economics, public health, and gender studies.Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages, andinclude Choice of Techniques (1960), Growth Economics (1970), Collective Choiceand Social Welfare (1970), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Commoditiesand Capabilities (1987), The Standard of Living (1987), Development as Freedom(1999), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006), The Idea of Justice(2009), and (jointly with Jean Dreze) An Uncertain Glory: India and ItsContradictions (2013).

Amartya Sen’s awards include Bharat Ratna (India); Commandeur de la Legiond'Honneur (France); the National Humanities Medal (USA); Ordem do MeritoCientifico (Brazil); Honorary Companion of Honour (UK); Aztec Eagle (Mexico);Edinburgh Medal (UK); the George Marshall Award (USA); the Eisenhauer Medal(USA); and the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Matthew Smith (pre-recorded Presenter)

Matthew Smith is a founder and executive director of Fortify Rights and a 2014Echoing Green Global Fellow. He previously worked with Human Rights Watch(2011-2013), where he authored several reports on critical rights issues inMyanmar and China. Matthew also served as a project coordinator and seniorconsultant at EarthRights International (2005-2011). His work has exposedwartime abuses and forced displacement, crimes against humanity, “ethnic

cleansing,” multi -billion dollar corruption, "development"-induced abuses, andother human rights violations. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall


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Street Journal, CNN, and other outlets. Before moving to Southeast Asia in 2005,Matthew worked with Kerry Kennedy of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice &Human Rights on Speak Truth to Power. He also worked as a community organizerin New York City and as an emergency-services caseworker in Mobile, Alabama. Hehas an M.A. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Le Moyne College.

Keynote Speaker's bio

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor and Founder of the Institute forComparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She was educated atthe University of Calcutta, and came to Cornell University in 1961 to finish doctoralwork. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), ThePost-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2008), AnAesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Readings (2014). Shehas translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976; the 40th anniversaryedition, re-translated with an added Afterword, has caused considerablecontroversy within the discipline) and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps (1994),Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), Ramproshad Sen’s Song for Kali: ACycle(2000) – 18th century hymns to Kali that undoes institutional Hinduism; andChotti Munda and his Arrow (2002). She has received honorary doctorates fromthe Universities of Toronto, London, Rovira I Virgili, Rabindra Bharati, San Martín,St. Andrews, Vincennes à Saint-Denis, Yale, Ghana-Legon, Presidency University,and Oberlin College. She won the Kyoto Prize (2012), and the Padma Bhushan(2013). She is active in the International Women's Movement, the struggle for

ecological justice; and has run six elementary schools among the landless illiteratein India for 30 years. Her influence has been felt in Art and Architecture, Law andPolitical Science, in curatorial practices. She works for Humanities education asthe best lasting weapon to combat contemporary disaster; and is engaged inharnessing the humanities for Development with colleagues at the University ofGhana-Legon, Kwara State University in Ilorin, Nigeria, and the University ofNairobi. This work is also effective In her membership of the Global AgendaCommittee on Values of the World Economic Forum.

Why the world must listen to the Rohingya (Abstract) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

As an activist from the region, I will be giving witness rather than offer freshinformation for public awareness. I will emphasize why this is a genocide. I willsuggest that all of us need to go beyond passive digital intervention because ofinformation overload. Whatever our area of involvement, we must now situate theoppression of the Rohingyas within the global map of injustice. I hope to learnfrom the experts in the area during my brief stay in Oxford.

Maya Tudor

Dr. Maya Tudor’s research inve stigates the origins of stable, democratic andeffective states across the developing world, with a particular emphasis upon SouthAsia. She was educated at Stanford University (BA in Economics) and PrincetonUniversity (MPA in Development Studies and PhD in Politics and Public Policy).


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She has held Fellowships at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science andInternational Affairs and Oxford University’s Centre for the Stu dy of Inequality andDemocracy.

Her book, 'The Promise of Power' (Cambridge University Press, 2013), was basedupon her 2010 dissertation, which won the American Political Science Association’sGabriel Almond Prize for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. The bookinvestigates the origins of India and Pakistan’s puzzling r egime divergence in theaftermath of colonial independence. She is also the author of articles inComparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, and Party Politics.

Before embarking on an academic career, Maya worked as a Special Assistant toChief Economist Joseph Stiglitz at the World Bank, at UNICEF, in the UnitedStates Senate, and at the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. A dualcitizen of Germany and the United States, she has lived and worked in Bangladesh,Germany, France, India, Kenya, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Kingdom andthe United States.

She will reflect comparatively on the mobilization of ethnic nationalisms andracisms to shed some critical light on the case of Myanmar’s persecution of theRohingya people.

Ro Tun Khin

Ro Tun Khin was born and brought up in Arakan State, Burma. His grandfatherwas a Parliamentary Secretary during democratic Period of Burma. Although well-established and respected, alongside a million other ethnic Rohingya, Tun Khinwas rendered stateless by a 1982 nationality law that excluded the Rohingya froma list of groups considered indigenous and therefore eligible for Burmesenationality. He is current President of Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK whichhas been a leading voice for Rohingya people around the world. Tun Khin hasbriefed officials on the continuing human rights violations committed againstRohingya populations at the US Congress and State Department, BritishParliament, Swedish Parliament, European Union Parliament and Commission, theUN Indigenous Forum in NY and the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Tun Khin has been a featured speaker on Rohingya rights for the BBC, Sky Al Jazeera, and many other outlets. He has also published opinion pieces in theHuffington Post, Democratic Voice of Burma and MizzimaBurmese Media outlets. Tun Khin received a leadership award from RefugesInternational Washington DC in April 2015 for his relentless effort working onRohingya issue.

He will discuss first-hand knowledge of the 6-methods Myanmar governments haveused systematically to destroy his Rohingya people: laws which discriminateagainst us; incitement and encouragement of hatred against us; to disenfranchiseus from any political representation; to starve us by stopping economic activity andrestricting humanitarian access; to use state violence against us; and to encourageand allow non-state violence against us


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Maung Zarni

Zarni or Maung Zarni has been a Burmese activist, organizer, scholar and educatorfor almost 30 years. He is an outspoken critic of his country’s autocratic rulers,an opponent of “Buddhist” racism and hate speech and an advocate for minorityrights. In the last 4 years, he has developed and run a genocide education programfor Burmese religious leaders through the Sleuk Rith Institute of Cambodia andorganized three previous international conferences on the Rohingya persecution atthe London School of Economics (LSE), Harvard University, and the NorwegianNobel Institute. In April 2015, Zarni delivered the Annual Owen KupferschmidMemorial Lecture at Boston College School of Law on the Rohingya genocide. Forhis contributions to global interfaith social movements through a combination ofscholarship and activi sm Zarni was awarded the “Cultivation of Harmony” awardby the world’s oldest interfaith organization, the Parliament of the World’s

Religions, in 2015. He has written extensively on Burma and held leadership,teaching, research or visiting fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation,Georgetown, Harvard, Oxford, LSE, Institute of Education at the University ofLondon, Chulalongkorn University, the Universiti Malaya and the Sleuk RithInstitute of Cambodia. He holds an MA from the University of California and a PhDin the sociology and politics of education at the University of Wisconsin where hedeveloped a keen interest in the rise of Fascism and ideological movements. WithProfessor Daniel Feierstein, Zarni served as a Judge on the Permanent People’s

Tribunal on Sri Lanka (2013).

Why do Buddhists kill? And How? (Abstract) – by Zarni

Unlike the increasingly mainstreamed view of Muslims and Islam as “violent” and“extreme”, the world holds a rose -tinted view of the world of Buddhists. Based onmy on-going multi-year research on the systematic persecution and popularviolence and hatred of the Rohingya minority in particular and racisms in BuddhistSouth East Asia, I will argue that the Orientalist views of Buddhists is deeplyproblematic and warrants a rigorous, empirical examination. A crucial componentin the process of Buddhist killing any "Anthropological Other" involves Buddhist

killers, monks and laymen and -women alike, performing a mental acrobaticswhereby they construct their targets, o ther Muslims or Rohingya Muslims as ‘anexistential threat'. I will stress that episodes of large scale violence are bothorganized and organic. Finally, I will argue that they are a direct outcome of anevolving symbiosis between the state and the society at large and an interfacebetween history, economy and culture or ideology.


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Aung San Suu Kyi meeting with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing,3 December 2015 (New York Times)

Documents

Myanmar's Democratic Transition: What does it mean for the persecuted Rohingya people?