movement tightened, leaving many communities confined to their villages, struggling to access hospitals, schools, and places they rely on for their livelihoods.14 Discrimination against the Rohingya takes place in a wider context of worsening anti-Muslim sentiment and religious intolerance across Myanmar over the past decade, which has at times led to attacks on Muslim communities causing deaths, injuries, and destruction of property.15 In some parts of Myanmar, local communities have – with the knowledge and at times support of local authorities – established “Muslim free” villages.16 Hostility against Muslims has often been fuelled by radical Buddhist nationalist groups such as the Ma Ba Tha (the Myanmar language acronym for The Association for the Protection of Race and Religion) that promote discriminatory ultra-nationalist agendas. Ma Ba Tha’s public sentiments often amount to advocacy of hatred constituting incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, which, under international human rights law, should be prohibited.17 The National League for Democracy (NLD)-led government, which came to power after decades of military rule in 2015, also actively propagated and inflamed anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya sentiment. This was especially the case after attacks were carried out by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) in October 2016 and August 2017. On 26 November 2016, while military operations were still ongoing in northern Rakhine State, state media published an opinion piece that described the Rohingya as “extremists, terrorists, ultra-opportunists and aggressive criminals” as “human fleas” who are “loathed for their stench and for sucking our blood”.18 After the 25 August 2017 attacks (see below), the State Counsellor’s official Facebook page regularly posted graphic photographs of Hindus, ethnic Mro and Rakhine villagers allegedly killed by “extremist Bengali terrorists”, using a common slur (“Bengali”) for the Rohingya which seeks to portray them as migrants from Bangladesh.19 3.2 THE 2017 ETHNIC CLEANSING OF THE ROHINGYA Against a backdrop of decades of systemic discrimination and apartheid perpetrated against the Rohingya population by the Myanmar authorities, on 25 August 2017, a Rohingya armed group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked a range of security and military targets in northern Rakhine State. Amnesty International found that ARSA fighters also massacred Hindu civilians on 25 and 26 August in Rakhine State.20 In the months that followed, the Myanmar security forces, led by the Myanmar Army (also known as Tatmadaw), systematically attacked the entire Rohingya population in villages across northern Rakhine State.21 The Myanmar Army would characterize these attacks as “clearance operations”, supposedly targeting ARSA insurgents in the region. In the months that followed, more than 702,000 people, including children – over 80 per cent of the Rohingya who lived in northern Rakhine State at the crisis’s outset – fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. In Myanmar and elsewhere, at the heart of what is often called “ethnic cleansing,” which is not a legal term, is an organized deportation operation – that is, coordinated action aimed at forcing people to leave their homes and country and at ensuring they do not return.22 The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population was achieved by a relentless and systematic campaign in which the Myanmar security forces unlawfully killed thousands of Rohingya, including young children; raped and committed other sexual violence against hundreds of Rohingya women and girls; tortured Rohingya men and boys in detention sites; 14 Amnesty International, “Caged without a Roof”, pp. 42-79. See, for example, Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN), Persecution of Muslims in Burma, September 2017; Physicians for Human Rights, Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila, May 2013; Tomás Ojea Quintana, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Report, UN Doc: A/68/397, 23 September 2013, paras 58-61; and Amnesty International, Myanmar: Investigate violent destruction of mosque buildings, 24 June 2016. 15 16 BHRN, Persecution of Muslims in Burma (previously cited), pp. 40-50. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 20: “Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.” 17 The Global New Light of Myanmar, “A Flea Cannot Make a Whirl of Dust, But…,” 26 November 2016, cited in Amnesty International, “We will destroy everything”, p.21. 18 19 Amnesty International, “We will destroy everything”, p. 21. Amnesty International, “Myanmar: New evidence reveals Rohingya armed group massacred scores in Rakhine State”, 22 May 2018, amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/myanmar-new-evidence-reveals-rohingya-armed-group-massacred-scores-in-rakhine-state 20 21 Amnesty International, “We will destroy everything”, p. 8. 22 Amnesty International, “We will destroy everything”, p. 137. THE SOCIAL ATROCITY META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA Amnesty International 14