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Argument reference · Rohingya

The Rohingya, Myanmar, and a genocide case still waiting on a verdict.

A clean argument map: the state sorts its own population into 135 official races and leaves one out, the 2017 campaign was documented as it happened, and the case is now before the world’s highest court.

My position: the Rohingya were stripped of citizenship by a law passed in 1982, confined and restricted for decades, then driven out of Myanmar in 2017 by a military campaign the UN’s own investigators said warranted prosecution for genocide. Myanmar’s statute makes belonging a question of which of 135 “national races” you are, and that is why I call this racism rather than only religious hatred.

None of that requires hating Buddhists, pretending Rohingya armed groups have never killed anyone, or claiming a court has convicted somebody when none has. A state built a legal machine for erasing a people and then used it. That is my claim, and I can source every part of it.

Precision

I criticise a military, a citizenship law and a state ideology. I do not turn that into contempt for Buddhists or Burmese people.

Humanity

Rakhine Buddhists have been displaced and killed in this war too. Saying so costs me nothing.

Consistency

Statelessness, collective punishment and burning villages are wrong here because I hold them wrong everywhere.