Bob Rae

My interest in Myanmar began about 20 years ago, when I was doing mediation work in Sri Lanka on behalf of the Forum of Federations. I was contacted by activists in the Burmese  community about events in their country. Paul Copeland, a Toronto lawyer I knew well, kept me up to date through his own work, and I met with scholars and activists who opened my eyes to the way in which the Burmese population had lived with a civil war, and a brutal dictatorship, for decades. Aung San Suu Kyi, whose father had been the founder of the Burmese army that fought for independence from the British, had been living under house arrest for a total of 15 years over two decades, and had become a global symbol of the struggle of her people for freedom. She won the Nobel Peace Prize and was granted honorary Canadian citizenship. 

Sri Lanka’s story is about the conflict between its majority Buddhist Sinhalese community and its minority Tamils, who are mostly but not all Hindu, and smaller Muslim and Christian communities on the other. The majority in the country feels deeply its minority status in the wider region, and the expression of that is a Buddhist nationalism which runs deeply through the majority population. This has its parallels in Myanmar, where the military plays an additional critical role as “founder of the country” and “guardian of national unity”. 

I followed events in Myanmar and Sri Lanka closely as foreign affairs critic in parliament between 2008 and 2013, and resumed my role as Fellow of the Forum of Federations after that. After years of struggle and continual fighting, the military dictatorship in Myanmar showed signs of seeking a compromise with Aung San Suu Kyi, who was far and away the most popular political figure in the country. The Forum held a board meeting in Yangon in the spring of 2015, and invited me to attend. My wife Arlene and I decided to combine that meeting with a longer stay and tour in the country. As with Sri Lanka, we found our travel experiences deeply enriched our feelings for the people and the beauty of the country, and left us even more deeply affected by the terrible violence that has divided and decimated its people. 

I did not meet Aung San Suu Kyi, who by then was political leader of the opposition, on this first visit to the country, but Arlene and I did have a chance to travel to some amazing sites — notably the temples of Bhagan and Inle Lake, as well as the major temples in Yangon. We left hoping to return to a country at peace, but that was not to be. A couple of weeks after a conversation with the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the way to and from Allan MacEachen’s funeral in September of 2017, I got a call from Ottawa asking me if I would serve as Special Envoy on the growing Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh, and head as quickly as possible to both Myanmar and the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. After briefings in Ottawa, I was on my way, and was one of the first outside visitors to the camp in late October, 2017. I was accompanied by a young foreign service officer, officials from our Mission in Dhaka, and a reporter from CTV News, Daniele Hamamdjian (who, sadly, has just seen her bureau in London close). 

What we saw was truly heartbreaking. The Kutupalong refugee camp was an instant city created in hilly, partly wooded terrain, with tents and shacks spread as far as the eye could see. Between that July and September, the month before our arrival, the camp’s population had swollen from 34,000 to 77,000 because of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya across the border in Rakhine state led by the Myanmar army (today the population is nearly one million). Workers in the camp were doing their best to create some order out of chaos, using skills and talents drawn from too many collective experiences of building instant shelters, organizing the distribution of food and responding to multiple medical crises. I visited the camp over three days, trying to get a handle on the extent of the catastrophe. Children showed me drawings of helicopters shooting and burning villages. Women shared horrifying accounts of systematic, sexual violence. Elders sat me down to describe the difficult lives their families had led in Rakhine State, and how there had been a steady erosion of their rights and freedoms over many years. This was not the first expulsion, and they feared returning. Their hope was for a resolution of their situation, and a recognition of their rights to citizenship and political participation in Myanmar. It was during these meetings that I first heard the word “genocide” to describe their fate at the hands of the Tatmadaw — the Myanmar military — and when I asked a spokesman for the group what message I should deliver to Canadians, he leaned in to say, “Tell them we’re human”.  These words became the title of my report on the crisis in early 2018.

After meetings with the prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, and her officials, I made my way to Yangon and Naypyidaw, the newly built capital city of Myanmar. Naypyidaw is not on most tourists’ wish list.  It is a truly bizarre place, with vast government buildings scattered over a huge expanse, joined by six-lane highways that were almost entirely empty of traffic. My meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, who was then state councillor, or prime minister, was difficult, because, now in power, she could not admit that the Tatmadaw could be blamed for what had happened in Rakhine. She insisted that radical groups among the Rohingya, notably the insurgent group the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA — designated a terrorist group by Myanmar — were really responsible for the atrocities (reports of ARSA atrocities have been confirmed, but the vast majority of casualties, based on all the available evidence, were committed by the Myanmar army and local civilians). The purpose of my meeting was to tell her what I saw at Cox’s Bazar, and that the terrible conditions in the camp needed to be improved. She replied that if that happened there was a risk it would serve as a “pull factor” for more refugees. I told her I genuinely doubted that, pointing out that “It’s not a Holiday Inn”.  The purpose of that initial conversation was to hear her views and prepare for a direct meeting between her and Prime Minister Trudeau at the upcoming Asia summit in Danang, Vietnam.

I arrived just in time to brief the prime minister and his team, and then attend his meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi. As could be expected, it was a difficult encounter, with little eye contact between them as they each laid out their positions. When it ended, Trudeau asked me to say what I saw in Cox’s Bazar, which I did, and I asked Aung San Suu Kyi if I could visit again to go to Rakhine State. She said, looking at me directly, “Come back to Naypyidaw and we can discuss”.  I immediately accepted her invitation for my next visit.

Early in 2018, I was back in the region, where I was able to meet with officials in Indonesia and Bangladesh as well as with Aung San Suu Kyi and two of the three Tatmadaw military members of the government. The meetings were all formal affairs, with many witnesses to the conversations. I realized that this was intended to ensure that there was no opportunity for private conversation or a candid aside. There were formal presentations intended to reinforce the message: according to her, the Rohingya have never been a “real” part of the country, poorly educated with large families, their Muslim faith was becoming more “radical and dangerous”.  She insisted that Myanmar was in the front lines fighting terrorism. 

The only concession was that I could go to Sittwe in Rakhine State, to see for myself “how beautiful and peaceful it was.” What I found was indeed beautiful in parts but far from peaceful. After an overnight in the UN compound, I was taken on a tour of the old city, where the small Muslim community lived in lockdown conditions after an anti-Rohingya riot had forced them into a ghetto. The mosque was shut and overgrown by foliage. I was then spirited into a vast camp where over 100,000 internally displaced Rohingya had been herded. Just a few weeks before, the camp had been devastated by a cyclone, and relief supplies were still being blocked by the Tatmadaw. We still didn’t know the extent of the devastation. 

At a hastily arranged meeting, one of the young Rohingya men began talking in American slang. I asked him where he had learned his English. He showed me his cell phone, and told me he loved American Westerns. He watched them over and over. He wanted more education and a chance to work. He would find neither under the rules imposed by the Myanmar government.  The next day, I was flown in a Russian helicopter to northern Rakhine. It was February 9, 2018.  I remember the date because my twin granddaughters were born the same day in Toronto. We flew up near the coast, which was indeed beautiful, but then crossed over former Rohingya villages that had clearly been burned and bulldozed. No one objected when I took pictures of these villages. If the trip was intended to show me that all was well in Rakhine State that was hardly my conclusion.

My report, “Tell Them We’re Human”, was published in April of 2018. (It can still be found on the Global Affairs Canada website). It recommended that Canada work with other countries to ensure the safety and well-being of the refugees in Bangladesh, as well as continue engagement with the Myanmar government to resolve the country’s bitter internal conflicts. The government agreed with most of my recommendations, and has now renewed its commitments to humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding assistance for another three years. 

My last encounter with Aung San Suu Kyi took place in The Hague in December of 2019, where in a preliminary hearing on the claim filed against her country under the Genocide Convention by The Gambia, she offered a fulsome and unapologetic defence of the conduct of the Myanmar army. It was a sad moment. Before leaving the court to meet the media, our eyes locked briefly.  She looked away and walked out. 

The conflict in the region has now become far more intense. Aung San Suu Kyi has been convicted on trumped-up charges of corruption, the Tatmadaw has seized power, cracked down on human rights and freedoms, producing a civil war. I have often been asked why the woman who was once a global human rights icon changed from being a spokesman for liberty and democracy to supporting the military’s campaign against the Rohingya. My sense is that she was always the faithful daughter of her father, whom she saw as the modern founder of both the army and the country. Not for the first time, many in the West had projected on to her values and beliefs that were more about us than her. She was the leader of her party and movement, but did not actually “run” the government.  It was controlled by the military’s brutal force she thought she could charm and tame.  She discovered that it’s tough to defang a tiger tooth by tooth. 

Defeated twice in elections, the army had had enough, and just as they turned on Aung San, they turned on his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi. And, as is their longstanding habit, they then turned on their own people, with thousands of casualties and millions living in hunger and poverty. Recurring cyclones and natural disasters have made life in Myanmar even more painfully difficult for everyone.

As Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, I now chair a group called The Friends of Myanmar. We do our best to keep pushing for more engagement from governments and the UN itself, to end the civil war, bring the military to justice, and allow the Rohingya to live freely in their country, Myanmar. Zoom calls with refugees, relief workers, and visits from democratic leaders give us the oxygen required to keep pushing the rock of freedom up the steep slope.   

Bob Rae is Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.