Yasmin Ullah is a Rohingya author, poet, and human rights activist based in Canada. Born in the North Arakan state of Myanmar/Burma, she is the founder and executive director of Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, a United Nations Minority Fellow 2023, and author of the children’s book Hafsa and the Magical Ring.
Doreen Chen is an Australian international human rights lawyer who co-founded and co-directs Destination Justice. She served as Lead Prosecutor for the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Myanmar and previously represented the senior surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
This interview was conducted on 18 April 2024.
CJLPA: To begin, I know that when CJLPA originally reached out to you both, we did so individually, not knowing that you were colleagues or collaborators! Can you tell us how your working relationship began?
Yasmin Ullah: I met Doreen in a conference at Columbia University in New York. We did not really have the time to chat, but I saw her with her husband and her child in a stroller and I thought, ‘wow’ throughout the panel that that she was speaking at, ‘what an articulate person’. She was such a badass. I really wanted to speak with her, we just got to say hi, that was it. But then there was another conference where we really got to spend time and talk. We began texting and we got to know each other even deeper on a personal level. I think the kids would say that we really ‘vibed’ with each other. I really respect Doreen and her work ethics and the framework that she has going on, and that has really inspired me to continue my journey. As an advocate it showed that there is such a person in this work that has not been bogged down by all the suppression and systemic violence that we deal with on a daily basis.
Doreen Chen: The only thing I am going to add to that little history is that I remember that when we first met, I sought Yasmin out at the conference in New York because she stole the show. She stopped a roomful of 200 people with her remarks. I do not think I have ever heard the same level of passion, the testimony of the survivor, the strength of an advocate, and the analytical horsepower, combined in one incredibly articulate person. So as I recall it, at the very end, I did have my stroller with my toddler with me at this conference. I came up to Yasmin at the end to tell her that I thought she was one of a kind. And we did ‘vibe’! I think what we sensed there was sisterhood, the power of connection, and mutual support that you can have in advocacy, and maybe how much we could both support each other in collective movement towards accountability for the Rohingya. We were both very busy but we kept trying to find ways to meet up across many different continents. That was seven years ago now—and the rest is history.
CJLPA: Amazing! My next question is about how the two of you came to work in this field—how did you both end up at that conference that day?
DC: Really, if you drill down into it, it comes from my parents. My parents were stateless. My mum was born in a civilian internment camp in World War Two and my dad is the child of refugees. They were raised in Southeast Asia—Mum in Taiwan initially, but mostly in Indonesia, and Dad born and raised in Burma. They eventually ended up in China, experienced the Cultural Revolution in China and then moved to Hong Kong. Eventually, Mum was given Australian citizenship because she had been born in Australia during in the war in the civilian internment camps, so she was entitled to it. My dad and my sister were able to naturalise that way, and they migrated to Australia. That journey that they had meant that they had this vision of social justice from very early on, it was just hardwired into the family. This has been dinner table conversation since I was a child. The notion of service and the value of supporting others has been drilled into us since a very young age. So that has always been the kind of direction I was taking.
I think I naturally gravitated towards Asia and Southeast Asia at the start of my career because of the many connections, there is a lot of history there. I ended up working in Cambodia in different things, including establishing my NGO Destination Justice. But I also worked at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in various capacities, including as the International Council for the senior surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge. And I think that role led to different connections with activists in Southeast Asia because it was one of the only international tribunals that has ever been established in the region, in addition to Bangladesh, that has dealt with accountability for mass atrocity crimes. There were a lot of academics, activists, and others visiting the tribunal on a regular basis to learn more about that accountability journey, and to see to what extent that could be applicable to their own struggles to achieve the same. So I ended up meeting activists working in and around the Rohingya accountability space, and that led eventually to work on the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar, which eventually led to that conference in New York. The subsequent work I have done since has largely been in collaboration with my wonderful husband.
YU: For me it was very similar, but also a little bit different. I had grown up, of course, in displacement in Thailand. We were refugees for a very long time. I was in Thailand for 16 years without really any protection status from my own government, the Burmese government, nor the Thai government at the time that we were living in in Thailand. That sense of injustice is something so difficult to swallow, it opens up so many sorts of vulnerabilities for us. Living life like that really taught me how I do not want to be treated and how I probably should not treat others. And I think, potentially, what happened was that I learned that the oppression that happens to Rohingya people is so deep-rooted in so many different layers, at different places, wherever we are in this world, until we find some sort of third place or third countries to resettle in. Even then, we remain exposed to this ongoing oppression by the Burmese government and others in the region regardless of where we have ended up, because our families are still exposed to these kinds of oppressions. It had been instilled in me for a very long time that we are just different from other people, and we are going to continue to have to struggle like this. At one point I did not want to be a Rohingya anymore, because why should it be such a struggle? Why should I claim this heritage of mine?
It was not until I moved to Canada, and resettled here through private sponsorship in 2017, that I realised I could make a really good life here for myself. I could venture into a career that pays well, live a life here and settle down. But what good is it if I cannot really protect those that are close to me, the people that I met when I was young yet never had a chance to go back to reconnect with? The people who share my roots, my culture, and my tradition. They make up everything that I am today, even when I do not know it or do not realise it. For a time, I felt quite helpless. But in 2017, when the genocidal campaign was launched by the military and aided and abetted by the civilian government, I realised, ‘I need to do something—I do not know what, but I needed to do something. I cannot just sit and cry’. I remember crying for like 24 hours straight before realising ‘okay, this is enough tears’. And suddenly an opportunity came through where I got to have fun by crowdfunding and fundraising among friends and family. At that time, I did not expect for more than around $2,000 to be donated by those around me. I talked relentlessly about the Rohingya plight in 2017, and people began to say ‘okay, how can we help’. I did not know how to do any of this at the beginning, but somehow, I found a way to gather this money together. It was like a hot coal because I did not want to keep it in my hand! This was so much money, and it was meant for someone else. I did not want to hold it with me for a long period of time.
Somehow, through the help of my mother and people that we knew in our network, we found ways around to get the money through the cracks into Burma during the crisis in the fall of 2017. Despite the fact that we had not even become a formal organisation at that time, we managed to send almost $40,000 by the end of December. It was very strange for me to feel so empowered, and to realise how far we got just crowdfunding among friends and family, and setting up a page online. But it really saved a lot of people. It helped a lot of the displaced population to be able to decide whether they want to stay in a country where their future is so uncertain and their safety is not guaranteed. They now had the choice to leave. Many people were able to use that money to actually either stabilise their situations and find immediate needs like food, water, and shelter, or they could use it to decide to leave. They would then pay fishermen to take them across, and not have to swim across the borders.
So I realised that this was my newfound confidence. It was so daunting and I did not know how to go from there. But through just working and talking to different groups of people, I was interviewed by a few different radio stations. And through that, I got connected with other activists in Canada who are concerned about this. And we basically came together and the Rohingya Human Rights Network was formed. We then began pushing for Canada to make a genocide determination regarding the treatment of the Rohingya. I think that that was where the wheels started turning for me. I began to think, ‘okay, this is traditional advocacy, this is lobbying, this is a top-down approach, and this is how to do that’. We were also looking at cultural influence for advocacy purposes, by using institutions like museums to actually do the bottom-up work. By using museums, we can try to influence culture and peoples’ understandings about Rohingya, or even simply learn about Rohingya in the first place. I think that all of these different efforts combined to bring together the pieces of what advocacy means for me. But Doreen and I also got to work together and really, really find support and strength within each other.
CJLPA: Yasmin, can you tell me a bit more about the scope and goals of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network? How often do you work with Doreen’s organisation, Destination Justice, and what does the work together look like?
YU: I obviously have a lot of a lot of respect for Doreen and I continue to be inspired by her work and her tenacity every single day. We also converge in terms of our understandings of intersectionality, feminism, and various different aspects of mass atrocity and gender. That heavily influenced my work. Because I realised, in every single mass atrocity, and especially the Rohingya genocide, gender was weaponised against the people who are going to be the carriers of violence and trauma in the long-term. This was done deliberately to ensure that the community is as broken and desecrated as possible.
From the very beginning with my former organisation Rohingya Human Rights Network and now with the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, I have continued to have this idea of the significance of gender to mass atrocity in the back of my mind informing all of my work. I do not think I would have been able to actually understand or make sense of everything without Doreen being there to guide me. Sometimes I cannot make sense of why a system is so broken and hell-bent against women, and Doreen is there to say ‘well, let me tell you something about it’. It is so heart-warming in such a cold and harsh place like this world to find someone like Doreen and so many other women who have been my mentors and advisors as well.
I think that the work between Destination Justice and the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network is more than simply collaboration on projects, but more so intertwined in principles, our hopes, and our end goals for our people and for the collectives—particularly the principle of Southeast Asian liberation. So, I think that our work together goes beyond what we have done or are currently doing, but is focussed in how we support one another. Destination Justice has worked with us on certain projects based around justice and accountability, but very specifically on women-led, refugee-led, and community-led initiatives.
These are initiatives that will not be bogged down by systemic discrimination or various different forms of white supremacy that inherently gets embedded in this in this kind of work, especially in the accountability work. Unfortunately, a lot of the time victims and survivors of genocide and mass atrocities are spoken down to, rather than uplifted. Our principles converge in the sense that we would like to see victims being at the centre and being agents of change rather than being the people who the laws or the decisions are made and targeted to. We are hoping to shift the gears a little bit for more widespread practice in the hopefully near future.
For the Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network specifically, the aspect of gender aspect heavily influences our work, beginning from the fact that we are an organisation founded by five Rohingya women in the diaspora. We each have stories of displacement and surviving genocide which are different, but all the same in the sense that we were all displaced from our own homeland. We now have to find our place elsewhere in the world. Our hope is for community-led initiatives and refugee-led organisations to be at the front and centre in receiving aid. We are pushing for aid to come to us directly rather than sifting through so many layers of NGOs and international organisations, and never really directly benefiting the people that need it the most. That is our general framework in general, but we also push for things that would help sustain our community beyond aid.
We understand that aid will not last forever, and our community needs to be sustained by other means, like social enterprise, which Doreen happens to know so much about. This means we may need a cultural revolution on the Rohingya issues beyond our surviving of genocide and being victims of genocide or mass atrocity. Beyond ‘woe is us, we have dealt with this for the past seven years’. How do we move beyond this victimhood and the mentality that is so rampant in this work? How can we have others or people who have not experienced what we have experienced actually look at us as agents of change? This bears repeating in so many different layers of our work. But I think it always comes back to the question of how to ensure that people see Rohingya, and Rohingya women specifically, as agents of change and as experts on their own experiences and their own livelihoods. How do we ensure that when we are at the table, when we are discussing decisions and policies and changes to be made, that the decision will be up to us, rather than up to those who do not live our experience?
DC: It may sound like she is stating the obvious, but this is not something that you can really take for granted in these kinds of accountability movements. The Rohingya accountability movement is not the first movement, by any means, that has tried to achieve this victim-centred and victim-led approach to accountability. But it is still not that common. And unfortunately, we find that in, in these movements, in aid and so on, there is a lot of colonialism, there is a lot of sexism, there is a lot of discrimination. It is wildly ironic, obviously, given the kinds of human rights violations and mass atrocity crimes that these movements are there to seek justice for. That is, it is wildly ironic that the movement itself then sort of replicates these very same forces of oppression in some senses.
As Yasmin has already said, that is the initial connection that we had. We at Destination Justice, as an organisation, have always been very interested in upending that notion, and Yasmin is a force of nature who is driven in this sense. There was a very natural meeting of minds, and it is something that has continued as an ongoing conversation. We do not pretend to have the answers. The appropriate way to deal with all of these things continues to evolve as society evolves and the situations and needs of the communities evolve and our understandings evolve as well. That is sometimes part of the connection itself.
Our connection may often be that we are collaborating on something: a campaign, a piece of change, other things that we cannot mention here. But as much as it might be about a tangible output, sometimes it is simply just about also understanding how we are doing things and checking with each other just to be sure. I often will go to Yasmin, when I am not sure about how something should be or whether this is the right way to do things, or to what extent does this respect the community and so on—and vice versa. So we are just kind of keeping each other in check.
In that sense, Destination Justice tries to see how we can assist human rights defenders and changemakers to use international law and international advocacy realms as a force for good. You would think that they are a force for good by their nature, but it is not necessarily the case. The idea is to empower changemakers like Yasmin to be able to engage in these spaces themselves. Yasmin has just been gallivanting around Geneva, doing just that as a United Nations Fellow. Those are the kinds of things that we hope for. We just try to provide technical assistance to human rights defenders and community organisers like Yasmin in this niche space where we are able to support. However, we take a backseat on all of the community engagement which Yasmin has been rightfully should be leading. It has been been a really interesting collaboration, and a really fruitful one. Unfortunately, it is not only the acts for which you seek accountability that can present challenges, but the spaces which you are trying to navigate to be able to achieve this accountability. These spaces can be just as frustrating and difficult and oppressing.
I think that this is a part of our connection as well. Yasmin has gone out on her own and established her network, and Destination Justice did the same. We were both trying to break the mould a little bit and trying to be nimble. For example, Destination Justice deliberately does not have a physical office—we try to do a lot of remote work and think about other ways that you can make a career in human rights advocacy sustainable. Yasmin mentioned, for example, social enterprise. We had a Justice Cafe for a few years in Cambodia, which was a wonderful space that I miss very much. In sum, our collaboration is just a lot of trying to create a safe space between us and innovate in terms of social justice. How can you achieve social justice in the most inclusive and respectful way possible, and in a sustainable way—mentally, economically, physically, and so on?
CJLPA: The values that you two are espousing come across so clearly. I think it is because you are obviously putting these values into practice even in the smallest things. Whether it is the way you are speaking to and about people, or the way you both direct your organisations, I can tell that it is done so intentionally and in a way that prioritises distributing power to those to whom it should be going.
I wanted to ask briefly on the question of international law, how you would characterise the attitude in Burma/Myanmar today toward international law? What is the rhetoric going around specifically about human rights law? What do you actually see happening in practice?
YU: Myanmar is a very young country, young in the sense that we have basically just began our journey or our connection to the world about a decade ago. 2011 or 2012 is when the country opened up. The first social media platform was Facebook, which was so prominent and so encompassing for everybody and became the main source of information for people. This went downhill pretty fast, because there was no filter, no moderation of content and the creation of content. Political parties and political figures actually use it and weaponise it for mass atrocity. Unfortunately, I think that was a very quick progression of how a state could justify mass atrocity, and how fast and how effective social media could be.
I am using this as a very clear cut example of how unfamiliar the country is to the international law and human rights standards. We have lived under the military regime for a very long time. Not counting the decade of quasi-democracy that we had, it was basically 40 years of military regimes, one after another, and different discriminatory policies and systemic shifts towards colonial legacies. And a lot of those legacies are dispossession, mass atrocities, accumulation of wealth for military organisations and power elites. People did not know what it was like to live without oppression. And that inability to imagine what the world should be like, or what social justice means, inform a lot of ways that people work. We have conflict complexities with ethnic armed groups, ethnic organisations, and divisions that were created by the military junta and the civilian governmental later on. I think that it is still incredibly difficult to actually have conversations around feminism or gender or international human rights standards and justice and accountability.
I fear that that conversation still has not gone deep enough into the depth of ‘what have we done in terms of harming one another?’, down into the smallest unit of the society. What have we done to one another? What do we owe to each other? And I have tried to have these conversations for a very long time, but it has been an uphill battle. I think that international human rights law or accountability mechanism are largely understood at face value. And, unfortunately, a lot of the time these people in the international realm do not come from the community. Many times, someone from the ivory tower reaches down to those in Myanmar/Burma. And to be frank, it is really difficult to have these conversations when people do not come with the lived experience of endless military regime and endless poverty.
More than half of the country lives below the poverty line on a day-to-day basis. The current population of Myanmar is more than 60% made up of women and young people. The good thing is that us being a young country and being a young population does leave a window of opportunity to discuss shifting attitudes and thinking and mentalities, but unfortunately the military's ideology has been so vastly influential that, for example, things like Burmanisation or prioritising of the dominant group remains in the consciousness. Even in the resistance movement, even in the civil disobedience movement, Burmans are prioritised in all aspects of political life. And it then does not leave a lot of room for us to talk about reconciliation or establishing the truth or really thinking about reckoning.
So I do not really have a proper answer to the question that you asked, but I do see the shift. Since the most recent attempted coup in 2021, the country is still currently in turmoil. Civil war has broken out and violence is widespread across the country, where other civilians, other groups, and other ethnic groups are also implicated. But it also shows that the Myanmar public is no longer going to bow down to the military junta or to the organisation, and it no longer has the power or the grip of the country that it thought it had. It is losing grounds to a lot of ethnic or armed organisation and resistance forces. This is also a very complex scenario all on its own, because this is a country that is not used to having accountability embedded in armed organisations. And that is a conversation that we are trying to have: let us talk about gender, let us talk about the enormity of mass atrocity that could be a feature out of this civil war, out of this lack of accountability built into armed organisation or lack of protocols that adheres to at least some level of international human rights law and standards.
My answer might sound very convoluted, but this is the kind of dynamic we are dealing with. Although there has been a shift, it needs to be pushed even further. Especially because we have a bunch of young people in the country who are trying to reimagine what the country could look like without this dictatorship, without the authoritarian regime. But at the same time, we have not been fed enough examples of what that could look like. This process of change will be dangerous, but we are trying our best.
DC: Building on what Yasmin has just said, I was thinking that states in Myanmar's position often like to say that human rights standards are aspirational, and that as nascent states that are not a position to grant all of these rights, or Myanmar's case they may say ‘I was not a party to all of the relevant treaties’—but they are a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). And although those rights are sometimes perceived as aspirational or non-enforceable, the UN has said that that is not the case. We should see human rights in the treaties as a minimum standard. And also as obligations to which Myanmar as a state party should be bound. And if we are talking about civil and political rights, even if the country is not party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), many of those rights have been given the status of customary international law. So it is not relevant whether they are a party to that treaty at all.
What we should understand is that human rights standards are not aspirational. We have defined a set of minimum standards that we expect all states to be able to abide by, regardless really of their economic development status. Obviously, there is a little bit of a margin, but not that much. And so it just frustrates me no end because Myanmar and many other states tend to use the same kind of rhetoric in order to dismiss the field entirely. And I think it doesn't wash with the state of the law as it is regardless of the treaty participation.
YU: That said, I feel I have done a little bit of injustice to painting the broad stroke of the understanding of the international human rights standards or accountability. Burma/Myanmar actually jumped into a lot of treaties and international human rights suggestions or standards. For example, we were one of the first few that actually jumped into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. We also became a party to the Genocide Convention fairly soon after the draft. I think that was a very good indication that when democracy was flourishing in the country, there were there were a lot of things that we could accomplish in terms of our cooperation in the UN systems and beyond. And even now, as the resistance forces gain ground in the country, the military junta is receding and losing power and losing its grip on the country, and the National Unity Government—the alternative government that was made by the previous civilian government and personnel that that came through the election in in 2020—are trying to make amends. Some of the ways that they are trying to do that is by releasing statements and press releases acknowledging the Rome Statute’s coverage on genocide against Rohingya, and that was not something that I thought I would witness in my lifetime.
I saw Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the previous civilian government, defend the military to the International Court of Justice in person, dismissing the victims entirely. Now her own people and her own party are saying the complete opposite. Although there is debate about the quality of how this subscription is going to work, that first step has been made. There is also a lot of discussion around cooperation with the with the legal team and with the Independent Investigative Mechanism of Myanmar, or the IMM. There are many other precedents set by the National Unity Government, again where we are still debating the practical steps beyond that, and we are still trying to push the needle a little bit further than where they are.
As Doreen said, it is aspirational most of the time. We want it to become more practical, rather than being treated as an aspirational goal somewhere up in the up in the sky. International human rights standards are great, but if they are not implemented in the country and embedded into the legal, political, social, or economic systems, it will be difficult for us to actually get anywhere at all. And we see the breakdown of these systems, hence why we are here today. So we are hoping that it could be translated into laws and reforms in the country. For example in Canada, we have Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that was heavily predicated on the UDHR. We are hoping something similar could happen in Burma/Myanmar.
CJLPA: Has there been any legislation that incorporates the rights of indigenous peoples or ethnic minorities?
YU: We have a constitution being drafted right now, the issue is, because of this Burmanisation and Burman dominant culture, Rohingya and other ethnic groups are somewhat excluded from the process. The Rohingya are excluded entirely. Currently there is not a single group representing them at the National Unity Consultative Council, which is the council that goes on to actually advise the National Unity Government, our alternative government from the previous civilian government. This in and of itself is an issue. There is one Rohingya organisation, Women Peace Network, led by our amazing Wai Wai Nu. The issue is that her organisation is actually part of the NUCC not as a Rohingya organisation but as a women's organisation. Obviously, there is a convergence of issues. At the same time, however, if not a single Rohingya representative is on this council, then we do not have a lot of ways to negotiate different laws passed, or via which the constitution can be reformed, scrapped, or rewritten.
This has been an issue particularly in a transitional justice framework, when a lot of other groups have basically said, ‘Oh, we can deal with the Rohingya issues later’. And ‘later’, this Marxist form of ‘let us deal with all the issues later on, we just need to eat the rich first’—this does not work because it has not worked in the previous transition. And the rest of the world has basically bid against this transitional justice, we are thinking about it too deeply. When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi came into power and the National League for Democracy took over, we had quasi-democracy because there was no real consideration of transitional justice and how we can actually take stock, do the reckoning, and establish truth and reconciliation. Even at this stage, while we are while we are discussing the future of the country beyond the military, there is still this lingering Burmanisation or Burman nationalism that prevents and creates barriers for groups like us and groups beyond the Rohingya community to actually flourish and have a space to discuss their own future in this country.
CJLPA: Is there a lot of room in Burma currently for Rohingya groups or organisations like yours? Are these sorts of organisations mostly diaspora-focused or are there many within Myanmar as well?
YU: It is fairly difficult to actually organise in the country. So far, Rohingya have been quite badly hit throughout the entire attempted coup. Rohingya—our resources and our access to aid our access to livelihood—have been dwindling. There were so many different barriers that already presented themselves prior to the attempted coup as a result of this 2017 genocidal campaigns. So many layers of systemic violence and policies and practices are put in place to ensure that Rohingya cannot organise. We still try and there are ways that aid is operated or aid from within the community is actually sent into the country and distributed and ensure that everyone is taken care of. Of course, it is not nearly enough.
When it comes to how Rohingya could organise or whether or not we have a space at the table, it is very difficult because we are contending with this issue where Burman nationalists do not see Rohingya groups who are trying to represent themselves or trying to partake in this building and rebuilding of the nation. It is almost out of left field for a lot of Burman nationalist groups, especially Burman Buddhist nationalists, where they do not see Rohingya as belonging to the country in the first place. And this all comes back to the tiers of citizenship and how ethnic nationality subscription is only a design that was created, as a new creation by the junta and the military regime since 1962. During that process, Rohingya have not only been stripped of our citizenship. The common misconception is that this is what disempowers us. But it is also the subscription to ethnic nationality or indigeneity in the country. Because if you do not have indigeneity, then you do not have ancestors that could be traced back before 1820. The new creation that came into effect after the military junta took over in 1962 was the idea of Burman Buddhists, singled out as the only appropriate group and only correct citizen of the country. This inherently disenfranchised the rest of the country, made up of other ethnic and religious groups.
The Rohingya were the group targeted by the military junta to be alienated first. It was almost like a test run. I think we are still the guinea pigs in this experiment, where the military is trying to see where how far it can push this marginalisation, disenfranchisement, and discriminatory policy and practice against us and against others in the country. But it ends in genocide and mass atrocity, which is, I think, the worst that it could be. This is based in the idea that the Rohingya never belonged in the country, that we migrated in 1970 or some years prior to that. But when you look at the historical, archaeological, and academic references and evidence, the factual findings, Rohingya ancestors have been there. We can route back to various other records, such as the Arab records from when there was a lot of intermingling and sailing across the ocean to enter the region. These records can be dated back as far as the seventh and eighth centuries.
This completely destroys the myth that the military junta and the Burman nationalists want to create. They want to create sense of belonging for themselves and for no one else. They have this very critical year of 1820, where anyone who cannot trace their ancestors prior to 1820 do not belong in the country. That is such an arbitrary year. British colonial records show the Rohingya people and even the term ‘Rohingya’ itself existing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At that time, the British East India company surveyed the area and recorded who the people were and what languages they spoke, and, voila, there was a group of people who speak Rohingya and practiced Islam. The idea that the country was mainly Buddhist, that mainly Burmans created everything, and that they are sole bearers of culture and the sole custodian of the country is inherently just nonsense.
All of this combined leads us to the contentious issues that we are currently grappling with today. Burma as a country still needs to go through so many different transformations, and one that is so crucial is moving away from the military and the Burman Buddhist nationalist ideology. In this ideology no one else belongs, and this country belongs to a very arbitrary group of people that was dated back to this date or this date. The reform needs to happen far beyond that and digging up all these pieces to actually do the reform will be extremely dire. But then, while we are having these discussions, Rohingya are excluded from this process. So the people who know best what this oppression looks like and how to undo it is completely excluded from it.
CJLPA: Doreen, I was hoping to ask you about your work with the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar. What is Rohingya inclusion like in that setting?
DC: I would say I saw a lot. Obviously, one of the difficulties with any tribunal is where you are located. The Cambodia tribunal that I worked at regarding the Khmer Rouge, for example, was one of the few that was actually located in the country where the crimes were committed. This means that accessibility for the relevant community is very easy. That said, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar was in Malaysia, where there was a vibrant and large cohort of Rohingya refugees living. Extensive efforts were made to bring in Rohingya colleagues, not only because the tribunal dealt with Rohingya but also Kachin and Shan peoples. Ultimately, I think, the Kachin and Shan did not participate in the final instance, but there were representatives from all communities. There were extensive efforts made to bring folks in to participate in the tribunal, and more importantly, to make space for what people had to say about their experience.
One of the advantages of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is that in terms of Rules of Procedure, it is a lot more flexible than, for example, the ICC, due to the type of institution that you are dealing with. And one positive outcome for victim survivors is that they were much more able to speak freely, and with the narrative of their choosing to describe what their experience was, which was critical. This is not something that normally happens—time limits are usually tighter. Normally, victim survivors, or the Civil Party seeking reparation, are asked to speak to a specific topic. This was sort of the case for the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, but we understood that truth-telling is probably the greatest outcome that a victim survivor can have, and doing so in accordance with their own framework of their own experience. We deliberately made a great effort to ensure that accommodations were made so that people could engage with the tribunal on their terms. So I absolutely cannot fault the institution in that way.
One thing I will also point out is that there was a special session that involved women specifically about sexual violence. This is probably less reported on the public because it was a closed session. Many parameters were set up so that women would feel comfortable testifying. They testified from memory before female judges only and with female prosecutors only. I was participating. There was a lot of preparation done with these people before and debriefing afterwards to ensure that the experience avoided retraumatising them as much as possible. I think that those are all commendable things.
I think international tribunals are magnificent for lots of things, particularly if you are looking for formal legal forms of justice and certain legal consequences to occur for individuals or perhaps even for states. But I am not sure that they are always the best. I am not sure that they are often the best suited for individuals participating in those structures, whether as witnesses, victims, or perpetrators, to be able to tell the story. Unfortunately, they are not really designed that way.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal took place in August 2017, just as the genocide for the Rohingya was unfolding, it was really ‘live’. The way that that actually fed into the hearing was that individual testimonies captured by the media and NGOs were screened and relayed to the hearings in real time, so that people could hear those stories directly from those individuals as they were arriving in Bangladesh or as they were being interviewed by organisations like Human Rights Watch on arrival.
CJLPA: Before we bring this interview to a close, I was hoping Yasmin could speak about how being a woman specifically has played into your role in advocating justice for the Rohingya, and other instances where you have seen women playing a major part?
DC: Can we talk about what it is to be young as well? Because she is both!
YU: Oh, this feels like a lifetime ago. I am thinking on the ways that Rohingya women have held this community together after being endlessly desecrated, just constantly being bombarded with attacks, and policies and practice that do not just discriminate but also really destroy the connection between people in the community. Carrying our culture and our traditions across the river and across the borders, trying to ensure that the community still remains to this day: that is the work of Rohingya women. It cannot be mistaken for any anyone else's labour.
Throughout all of this, after surviving, women have been the ones who are predominantly more open to cooperating with different groups of people who are collecting testimonies. The most dire and heart-breaking stories, the ones that go on to establish mass atrocities and establish the suspicion of genocide, come from women. They are the ones speaking about sexual and gender-based violence openly. The have been the ones relaying information to lawyers and prosecutors and they continue to do so until today.
Unfortunately, we feel that they have been over-interviewed and over-extracted for their information and continuously put through this re-traumatisation process. Beyond the refugees or the survivors or the victims, those in the diaspora also have a role to play, beyond translation and interpreting and beyond trying to repackage the information for those outside the communities to understand. There are also roles that we play, for example, in documentation. Razia Sultana wrote a book called Rape by Command that actually sheds light on the chain of command in terms of who orders rape and the mass rape to happen, who orders the sexual and gender-based violence, and that could be routed back to the mastermind and architect of this genocide, General Min Aung Hlaing.
Women Peace Network have done a lot of work in terms of documentations but also working on sustaining and uplifting the community from the inside, and from the outside ensuring that the international community understands what goes on in the country. They are also playing the role of peacemaker and connecting with other communities. Even though our community is not well represented in the NUCC, they are still bearing that responsibility to ensure that some level of representation remains.
I do not think that we cannot downplay any part of the work that Rohingya women have put into our role at Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network. We are focusing solely on changing the ways that people look at Rohingya in Southeast Asia because we understand that ASEAN has a role to play, even if people think that it is dead because it has an approach of non-interference. We think that it should change and why not—just let us just put in the work and see how far we can push it!
Every revolutionary that has that ever existed has had to sit down and say, ‘No, we are not going to let the status quo operate the way that it has operated. We are going to challenge it’. This is what we are trying to do. On so many levels, Rohingya women have done all that we can to ensure that our voices are heard and that the world understands what happened inside our country and to us. At the same time, we are also trying to push further into the reforms, into the changes, in the best way that we know how.
The challenge remains that we are not only looked down on by those outside our communities, but also prevented from participating meaningfully in the rebuilding of our community and in the rebuilding of Myanmar/Burma. As women, as young women, and as an organisation made up of young women on top of all of this, we have dealt with so much scrutiny. For example, in Southeast Asia right now there is a hate campaign against Rohingya. Something terrifying is that the language in these hate campaigns is very similar to the genocidal language leading up to the events of 2017. Our fear is that ultimately these groups of people, a few hundreds of thousands of Rohingya that are currently residing in Southeast Asia, will not find a safe place, and will eventually be pushed into vulnerable situations or unsafe circumstances or be forcefully repatriated.
The bulk of the work is not just about us contending with politicians and policymakers. There are also issues around hate comments on any sort of content we push out, because today we live in a digital age. For example, there was a video of my colleague Noor Azizah, a director at our network, featured by UNHCR Asia Pacific. The video was one minute long, no longer, and it was about Rohingya wanting to sustainably repatriate and what conditions should be met. It was very standard practice thing—there was nothing new that she was introducing—but the video went viral. There were only around 150 likes, but there were more than 5000 comments and counting. They all came from Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia talking about how Rohingya should go home, they are uncivilised, they are this, they are that. Noor is a very poised, graceful young woman—even younger than me! It is so mind-boggling that even when she is not making any sort of controversial statement, just stating facts and talking about what Rohingya people want, that she is not being listened to or treated with kindness and grace that it should. This is merely one instance of this sort of online treatment.
On top of this, we deal with not just the public, but also people in our community, men in our community, who are threatened by our presence and existence. Unfortunately it exists in all of the communities. As women become louder men become really, really threatened. Regardless of what label we put on ourselves. It is almost impossible to exist as a woman in this world, having to feel like you are smaller and being made smaller and irrelevant every single day. But Rohingya women show up and we continue to show up every day. In the International Court of Justice and in the Universal Jurisdiction case against Myanmar in Argentina, there are four main victims that are featured. These four women have shown so much courage, tenacity, and bravery. They have shown their faces and told their stories over and over again, been scrutinised by the court and the media, just so that they could raise the status of our issues. That is participation of Rohingya women.
I hope that in our work with Destination Justice, that we could make it a little bit safer, more victim-centric, deeper rooted in the future that we want to imagine, in the reforms that we are trying to push. We do not want to just use the labour of Rohingya women left and right without rewarding them for what they have brought to the table. At the same time, we want to also be able to participate meaningfully, and not just limit Rohingya women to storytelling roles where they must cry in front of camera. Beyond that, how can we uplift them to the point that they no longer need these systems that uphold white supremacy, colonialism, and all these other oppressive mechanisms, but actually be able to raise their status, wherever they may be, and keep them safe?
DC: Finishing with the idea of redundant systems, I would say that our goal at Destination Justice is to be redundant. We want to be out of a job! Our hope would be that we do not exist in the future because there is no need, no injustice, and all is well. But even if we continue to exist, we are looking to be even more in the background and have even more empowered human rights defenders and communities being able to take things forward themselves. We will provide support as needed in the background. But in an ideal world, I would say we should not exist at all. If we do, let us hope there is a little bit more accountability down the road, and that that accountability has been truly led by the victims and survivors from outside and by women and young people.
This interview was conducted by Alexandra Marcy Hall, Legal Researcher on The Human Agenda. Alexandra Marcy is a human rights professional who has practiced and researched extensively in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. She currently works in advocacy for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants living in London.