The rohingya crisis

Miad

Yacine

International relation theory

Argumentative essay

How can we explain the nearly absent ASEAN's role in solving the rohingya crisis?

Unfortunately, we have attended to several genocides and persecutions of minorities throughout history. Today, it's to the turn of Rohingyas to be faced with what the UN's human right officials have reported to be '' a textbook ethnic cleansing ''.

6700 rohingya including children under the age of five years were killed in the month after the beginning of the reppression. Since 2017, more than 720 000 rohingyas have fled to seek refuge in Bangladesh and  for the present, 1,300,000 people are in need and targeted. The UN describes the rohingya's crisis as ''the world fastest growing crisis''.

In the face of this situation, the ASEAN (Assembly of South-Est Asian Nations)  shows an inability to act which was subjet to a lot of criticism. Altough, those last years, the ASEAN has provided itself of several human rights tools on behalf of which we could expect an intervention.This lack of commitment to deal with the crisis in spite of those diplomatic leverages and all the evidences and the proofs such as the satellite images, pictures, the videos and the UN's reports demostrating the emergency to act raise the following question :

How can we explain the nearly absent ASEAN's role in solving the rohingya crisis?

Through the realism and the constructivism, we will see the ASEAN's behaviour can be explained by an inability for the ASEAN to lead its member states to respect the arrangements and institutions in the field of human right they built.

According to the realist perspective, states are sovereign. In the ASEAN, this concept of sovereignty is reflected by the non interference principle which was lined out in ASEAN’s foundation document, the Bangkok Declaration, in 1967. Not only, this principle ensures the member state they will be able to handle their domestic issues without any external intervention but also the ASEAN's countries commit not to undertake any actions which could harm the established power's authority in any member state.This principle makes the intervention of ASEAN in the rohingya crisis difficult.                                                                                                                  

Besides, according to the realism's point of view, the states are very reluctant to cooperate since they don't believe in common good. So dealing with normative issues such as human rights seems therefore excluded: '' The anarchic structure of international politics, as well as the tendency of states to pursue national interests, are two main factors why realists tend to avoid talking about human rights '' (Dunne & Hanson, 2012, p. 63).In the case of ASEAN, it's this non-interference principle which reduces the sphere of action in the human rights field. Altough, the ASEAN adopted ''the ASEAN charter'' in 2008 whose declaration calls clearly the state members to the ''respect and protection of human rights and fundamental freedom '' (ASEAN, 2008, p2), in 2009, by setting out the AICHR (ASEAN intergouvernemental Commission on Human Rights) which is ''the overwatching body with a cross cutting mandate handling matters related to human rights cooperation with other ASEAN Bodies, external partners and stakeholders” (ASEAN, 2009, p. 1) and finally in 2012 with the signature of the ''ASEAN human rights declaration'' in Phnom Penh.

Those advancements in the field of human right were really surprising because they seemed to lead inevitably the ASEAN to break with the non-interference principle which was its trade-mark. However, far from being handled well, the rohingya issue was totally overlooked, notably at the 26th ASEAN Summit on 26-28 April 2015 in Kuala Lumpur. And the crisis was managed by individual members such as Bangladesh, Indonesia or India instead of the regional organization as we could expect. This situation can be illustrated again by the realist perspective of human rights that Landman summarises very well by saying states are willing to commit in human right only in order ''to gain short-term benefit and raise international legitimacy while counting on weak sanctions and largely unenforceable legal obligations''.  And indeed those arrangements in the area of human rights have proved to be very ineffective for managing an humanitarian crisis while institutions like AICHR are described as '' toothless tigers '' by the observers.                                  Furthermore, in the logic of the pursue of individual interest, it's really dangerous for a state, especially ASEAN's state to blame an other state for not respecting the human rights.And for good reason, a few states in Asia can brag to be irreproachable about it.States such as China, Vietnam, Thailand have problems with their own minorities whether it's for ethnic or religious reasons some people keep being arrested and being subject of discriminatory laws.Thus if a state decides to accuse an other, those accusations might end up backfiring on him at some point.                                                                                                                                                          

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