The Crime of Indifference

I'd been planning an article examining why Australia has done relatively little with regard to the genocide of the Rohingya.

I was going to look at the excuse of trying to encourage burma's (I refuse to use "Myanmar" until that nation is a true democracy, and I don't consider burma has earned the right to have its name capitalised) transition to democracy, but the military have arranged a facade of democracy where they control key pieces and excluded Aung San Suu Kyi (whose reputation is now in tatters) to the extent that a recent ranking of how democratic nations are puts burma at 118 (out of 167), in the "authoritarian" regime range. So . . . if the aim is to encourage burma to become a true democracy, a lot of work remains to be done, and, at the very least, there is a case to consider that the world and burma are still at the stage of saying "no, burma, that's not democracy".

I was also going to examine those in bureaucracy who may have a misplaced pride in being focused only on the "interests" of Australia - interests being as defined by the elites in power. The problems with that are (a) it is in everyone's interest to stop genocide (which is why there is often such strong reluctance to admit the word genocide applies, with euphemisms such as "acts of genocide" or "ethnic cleansing" being used by those who, basically, just don't want to have to do anything), and (b) we're talking about an already declared genocide (see here, here, here, and here - and burma has a history of this, having first driven the Rohingya out when it invaded their lands back in 1785 [and then conveniently "forgetting" that those returning after were, indeed, returning to land the burmese had driven them out of], and currently continuing their wars and persecutions against other minorities in burma), so, morally, those who want to focus on "interests" and ignore the moral or ethical aspects of their disdain for the Rohingya and their suffering are treading perilously close to the stance of the similarly focused bureaucrats who enabled the Holocaust (they're NOT there - yet, but they're drifting uncomfortably close).

I was also going to examine the drivers affecting the moral compass of politicians - which I could simplify as being basically whichever way the voters' noses are pointed, but that trite-ism (to coin a word) does a disservice to the many genuine politicians we have (some of whom I have personally met, and have the greatest respect for). Those politicians are, however, operating in a political reality that has been manipulated by powerful forces, including a couple of decades of intellectual mediocrity, the power of conservative media/oligarchs, and the apparent indifference and cynicism on the part of voters, and there is also now a misperception that what the elites define as "enlightened self-interest" (meaning whatever aligns most with maintaining the oligarch's wealth and power) governs what voters care about. That is not only misleading, it is active deception - in other words, a lie.

What voters care about includes things like the future of their children, the wellbeing of their friends (family of choice) and family, and their lifestyle. Voters are not idiots, so, when properly informed, most are perfectly capable of understanding the significance of issues such as climate change (counter arguments about things like job security need to be listened to and properly considered by those doing to explaining, by the way), why the war on drugs is a failure, and why instability and repression in nations (such as Malaya in the 1950s, East Timor in the last few decades of the 20th Century, and North Korea throughout most of its history) can be a threat to others.

I was going to do all that . . . but the key point is actually hidden in a previous paragraph: indifference.

Samantha  Power, in her book "A Problem  From Hell", discusses the "lack of imagination" that had a role in several US instances of non-action, with those receiving reports in "official-ese" not properly comprehending the disaster that they were reading about. That can, indeed, be a problem, in my opinion, but I think it can also be overplayed - like the misogynists I encountered in engineering in the 80s and 90s who refused to provide extra toilets for women, despite knowing that queues were longer, because they didn't know exactly how many extra to provide, or those who abuse guides such as clarifying "preferred" pronouns to highlight the trans history of people when they know full well what the person's "preferred" ( a more accurate description is "correct") pronouns are, or those who think "empowerment" is reason to avoid critiquing faulty systems (such as the nature of work, or workplace discrimination), as well as the examples cited above of those who use details and words as excuses to avoid taking action (I have long suspected that such fear of doing something, for whatever reason [and there are several], is behind the focus on "better" measurement in some branches of engineering and local government).

The truth is, at least as far as the genocide of the Rohingya is concerned, that brave journalists and survivors have made what is happening abundantly clear. There is no vagueness, "fog of war" or other excuse for claiming "we didn't know" - we even have the benefit of 70 years of hindsight from the Holocaust, and more than a century from the Armenian Genocide that led Lemkin to develop the word "genocide" and lobby for the Genocide  Convention. There are even organisations which report on these matters, such as Genocide Watch, and, to a less specific extent, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect!

The fatuous excuses that nothing can be done - well and truly debunked in Ms Power's aforementioned book - also hold no water here. As far as Australia is concerned, for example, apart from continuing to aid the incredibly generous but overwhelmed Bangladesh, we can send a strong signal of disapproval by cutting our military aid to burma, as other nations have done.
(As far as the argument that it enables communication between Australia's military and burma's military goes, I am not confident in the ability of Australia's military, given the misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and animal cruelty of some of its [generally lower rank] members and its past enabling of Indonesian abuses, to adequately portray a message of disapproval of human rights violations - that is hard enough for anyone who has to work with any abuser.)

Politicians, already under pressure on a wide range of major issues, won't take action unless Australian voters show they care about the Rohingya - and, sadly, most of us don't. There are a wide of explanations that can be given (the challenge of caring for strangers, being overwhelmed by the pressures of life [which I can certainly relate to, given the illness of a close family member combined with job pressures], and so on), but, at the end of the day, it is indifference to terrible suffering that is causing the insipidness of Australia's approach to the still continuing genocide of the Rohingya.

And that leaves me heart broken.