LONDON: Four years have passed since Myanmar’s military crackdown drove more than 742,000 mostly women and children of the Rohingya minority over the border into Bangladesh — a mass displacement which UN investigators say amounts to genocide. Now, in the wake of the Feb. 1 coup, the Rohingya are again left wondering what lies in store for them.
Myanmar’s military, known as Tatmadaw, seized power in a bloodless coup on Monday, detaining Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Secretary; President Win Myint; and several other senior cabinet ministers just hours before parliament was due to reconvene for the first time since elections on Nov. 8.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won the election by a landslide, but the Tatmadaw alleges widespread fraud. Now army chief Min Aung Hlaing has appointed himself head of a new cabinet.
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim, a director at the Center for Global Policy and author of the 2017 book “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide,” believes the coup has changed very little for the persecuted Rohingya minority — in large part because Myanmar had only the “veneer” of democracy in the first place.
“The reality is that not much has actually changed,” Ibrahim told a webinar hosted by the Arab News Research and Studies Unit on Wednesday. “Despite the fact that we had elections in Myanmar on two occasions, many would argue that it wasn’t actually a real democracy by any stretch of the imagination.”