Human rights prof denies ethnic cleansing of Rohingya
CANADIAN ACADEMIC ACCUSES REFUGEES OF FAKE RAPE REPORTS
• Merle Jacobs teaches in the equity studies department at York University. Her research covers topics including social justice, human rights and vicarious trauma. She is also a public and prominent denier of what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other organizations have deemed to be the brutal ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims.
More than 500,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar since late summer, according to the United Nations. They were forced from their homes and pushed into Bangladesh following a systematic campaign of often savage government violence, according to multiple independent reports.
But Jacobs, who left Myanmar when she was 18, has repeatedly, publicly denied that what’s taking place in her homeland amounts to ethnic cleansing. “UN corrupt,” she wrote on Twitter on Sept. 12, “never charged US/ UK over false wars, drones … Myanmar not involved in ethnic cleansing.”
Six days later, she doubled down. “( T) his is not ethnic cleansing,” she wrote. “Yes the army is ruthless, just like US in Iraq. Westerners are hypocrites.”
Jacobs’s denials run counter to virtually every credible, independent account of the situation in Myanmar. Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, said there can be no doubt about what’s actually going on.
“We never come forward with the sorts of statements we’ve made lightly and without extensive evidentiary basis,” he said. “We are absolutely confident in our assessment that the Rohingya have been subjected to widespread ethnic cleansing ( and) extensive crimes against humanity.”
In a bulletin released last week, Amnesty presented evidence, based on scores of on- the- ground interviews, that the Myanmar military had murdered “at l east” hundreds of civilians, raped untold numbers of women and girls and systematically burned Rohingya villages.
The scale of the violence has been shocking, even to seasoned human rights workers. “We have emergencies division researchers who have worked in Darfur and South Sudan and Iraq and Syria and all of them … say they have never documented atrocities committed with such brutal and sadistic fury as this ethnic-cleansing campaign,” said John Sifton, the Asia Advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
Those researchers have interviewed dozens of women who have reported being raped, often by multiple government soldiers, said Sifton. Their accounts, he continued, were “horrifying.”
But Jacobs, an associate professor who once headed York’s program in human rights and equity studies, has cast doubt on those claims as well.
“As a woman, sexual assault can be charged, but the investigation is complex,” she tweeted in reference to reports of sexual violence against the Rohingya on Sept. 30. “A case against Toronto police was dismissed.”
She continued in the same vein the following day. “I am concerned about rape, but stories can be made up blaming soldiers when it can be from their own men,” she wrote.
To Ronan Lee, a former Australian politician turned human rights researcher in Myanmar, Jacobs’ comments on rape victims are especially galling. “I don’t think there’d be a victim at her institution that would feel she is a safe person to report a sex crime to,” he said. “She’s on the record as expressing abhorrent views, disrespecting victims in a way that’s disgusting.”
Jacobs, who counts “trauma in ethnic women” as one of her research interests, suggested on Oct. 21 that at least some of the many rape reports could have been fake.
“Wait till the children are born,” she tweeted in reply to a comment about pregnant rape survivors. “Will they look part-Burmese?”
In a brief interview with the National Post, Jacobs herself admitted that some sexual violence had likely taken place. “I’m not going to say they ( the soldiers) didn’t rape them,” she said. “OK?” But she did question the extent of the attacks. “Have 70,000 been raped? I don’t know.”
( It’s not clear where Jacobs got that figure from. No major human rights organization has made such a claim.)
As for ethnic cleansing, Jacobs said it’s a question of terminology and evidence. “First of all, you see, I am a scholar, I want a definition of ethnic cleansing and the definition you get is varied,” she said. “Have 500,000 been crossed over and moved? Yes. Are all Muslims in Myanmar being moved out? No? … So how is ethnic cleansing happening?”
But to Neve, there is no ambiguity in the situation at all. “Six hundred thousand people do not flee a coun- try in less than two months and huddle in overcrowded makeshift refugee sites in the world’s most impoverished country just for the fun of it,” he said.
Neve wouldn’t comment directly on Jacobs’ tweets. But he did say that anyone denying that mass human rights abuses have occurred “should be very actively challenged and disputed in a university context.”
( In a statement released to the National Post, Jacobs’ employer said her tweets “represent her own views.”
“York considers the privilege afforded by academic freedom as vitally important to robust and respectful dialogue. We deeply value and encourage a diversity of opinion and thought in our university community, however, that does not extend to words and deeds that incite hatred or violence.”)
Jacobs’ public comments on the Rohingya crisis are not necessarily out of step with mainstream opinion among much of Myanmar’s population and in l arge chunks of the expat community. Many believe the Rohingya were never entitled to be in Myanmar in the first place .
To Sifton, her comments sounded sadly familiar.
“I don’t know this woman. I don’t know what her motivations are. But I read the statements and, I mean, they remind me a lot of the stuff you get from Burman ... nationalists who don’t believe any of this is happening,” he said.
“I have no comment other than to let the facts speak for themselves. Anybody who’s been to Cox’s Bazaar (home to the largest refugee camp), anybody who’s seen the images and heard the testimony from the people who’ve fled and the massive human misery and destruction would know that denying the Burmese military carried this out is just an impossible position to take.”