Can the World Stop Genocide?

As the UN convention against genocide turns 70, its failures are tragically apparent

Squatting on a UN refugee agency mat, clutching her listless two-year-old, Setera Bibi tells her story. Last year, at 4am on August 25th, the 23-year-old was awoken by gunfire. Fifty soldiers were rampaging through her village in north-east Rakhine state, in the west of Myanmar. Entering her house, they grabbed her husband. Four hours later he was returned, his beaten and bloated body wrapped in his own longyi. He had been tortured to death.

She buried him as the village burned. Scooping up her two daughters and her mother, she, along with hundreds of others, fled for the Bangladeshi border. Two days into her flight she had to cross a swollen river, a daughter in each hand. Her terrified youngest, just a baby, wriggled free and was swept away, never to be found. Ms Bibi’s party were chased by soldiers. Several were shot. Her less mobile mother fell behind. Soldiers beat her with their rifle butts, breaking her back.

The survivors eke out their days in a small hut in the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong, just inside Bangladesh. Ms Bibi’s mother cannot even walk now. She hopes her remaining daughter, Adija, will not recall much of the horrors. But her desolate eyes tell their own story. Malnourished, with a chronic cough, she is too weak to go to school. All three subsist on a ration of just rice, pulses and cooking oil. Asked about the future, she dare not think beyond the end of the week.

There are now 900,000 Rohingyas in the 27 camps on a spit of land called Cox’s Bazar. Most have similar stories to tell — of loved ones beheaded in front of their eyes and of babies thrown onto the flames. About 80% arrived in the last four months of 2017, fleeing an onslaught that killed at least 10,000 people — probably far more. Men were particular targets; 16% of those in the camps are single mothers.

The Rohingyas’ suffering clearly meets the criteria for “genocide”, as set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide passed by the UN on December 9th 1948 — ie, acts intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. A report for the UN Human Rights Council…

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