SEMINAR: Anthropology/Sociology Seminar Series

The recent violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya shows that genocide and ethnic cleansing are not relics of a past era. In late 2017, the Myanmar military and local Rakhine proxies drove almost 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, killing 6,700 in the first month alone. The attacks were systematic, involving mass killings, rapes and the razing of entire villages. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar concluded the violence bore “the hallmarks of genocide”. In this lecture I consider why the Myanmar military launched this campaign of annihilation by comparing the events with the genocides against Rwanda’s Tutsi in 1994 and the Indonesian Left in 1965/66. I contend that genocide occurs during periods of rapid political change when militaries perceive a serious threat to their political and economic interests and self-appointed status as the ‘guardian of the nation’. Waves of persecution against a hated group generate substantial support among civil society groups, reaffirm the military’s central role in society while simultaneously instilling sufficient fear to preclude any further challenge. Genocides can be both popular and effective.