A famine looms large over Myanmar’s Rakhine State

Myanmar’s humanitarian nightmare – for too long forgotten by the rest of the world – is about to get even worse, with the United Nations warning of a “perfect storm brewing,” which could result in a famine in Rakhine State, putting its two million people at risk of starvation.

Without urgent action, nearly the entire population will, according to the UN, “regress into survival mode.”

They are facing “total economic collapse.”

In a report titled Rakhine: A Famine in the Making released last week, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) claims the region in western Myanmar “stands on the precipice of an unprecedented disaster.”

Rakhine State “could face acute famine imminently” due to a combination of factors, including restrictions of goods entering the region across international and domestic borders, absence of incomes, hyperinflation, significantly reduced domestic food production, and “a lack of essential services and a social safety net.”

According to the UN, a population that has already been “highly vulnerable” for some years may “be on the brink of collapse in the coming months.”

According to data gathered by the UNDP across Rakhine State in the past two years, the state’s economy “has stopped functioning,” with critical sectors such as trade, agriculture, and construction “nearly at a standstill.”

Domestic food production is predicted only to be enough to provide twenty percent of the population’s needs by March next year, with internal rice production “plummeting.” Essential services such as healthcare, education, and access to clean water and sanitation are becoming luxuries out of reach for many, with almost a quarter of all children no longer attending school.

The responsibility for this latest crisis – which UN assistant secretary general and regional UNDP director Kanni Wignaraja describes as unprecedented – lies fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the country’s illegal and brutal military dictatorship, which seized power in a coup on Feb 1, 2021, and has unleashed a campaign of terror throughout the country over the past three and a half years.

In addition to perpetrating widespread, systematic, and appalling violations of human rights – many of which amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes – the illegal junta has wrecked the economy and plunged an already poor population into further dire and desperate poverty.

Rakhine State – which has consistently been ranked the poorest or second-poorest region in Myanmar ever since the country’s independence in 1948 – has been the scene of some of the most egregious human rights atrocity crimes.

Of greatest severity is the genocide of the predominantly Muslim Rohingyas at the hands of the Myanmar military over the past eight years. That genocide, recognized as such by the United States administration and others, began with a shocking campaign of terror by the Myanmar military in 2016, continued in 2017, and resumed in August this year with further massacres along the Naf River on the Bangladesh border.

Nearly a million Rohingyas live today in refugee camps in Bangladesh, where they face humanitarian challenges due to funding shortages that have led to the UN cutting food rations.

But while the world has – quite rightly – focused attention on genocide, which is regarded as the crime of all crimes, it has largely ignored the plight of ordinary Rakhine people in the region as well. They are suffering human rights violations at the hands of the Myanmar military, too, and now, as this new report warns, a dire humanitarian crisis.

Failure to heed the warnings of famine will not only result in two million people facing starvation, but it will also exacerbate tensions in an already blood-soaked and conflict-ridden region. It is therefore imperative and in everyone’s interests that this impending disaster be met with help immediately.

Ever since the coup in 2021, I have – along with others – been a fierce advocate for targeted economic sanctions against the ruling military junta. I have not changed my mind on that one iota. Indeed, I call on the international community to redouble and re-enforce those targeted sanctions. We should do everything possible to cut the lifelines to the junta, to impede their capability to bomb, displace, and kill civilians.

But the important word in the last paragraph is “targeted.” If you read anything I have written since the coup, you will find a consistent message: cut the lifelines to the regime and provide a lifeline to the people. I want the regime to be starved of arms – I don’t want the people to be starved of food and livelihoods.

The UNDP report’s recommendations should be studied carefully and in that light. Goods should be allowed to enter Rakhine, and domestic restrictions within Myanmar should be lifted. The international community must pressure the junta to ensure commercial goods necessary for daily life flow in and out of Rakhine.

The Bangladesh and India borders should be re-opened for business-to-business channels with Rakhine to bring supplies to local markets – as long as these do not benefit the junta. We are talking about life’s necessities: rice seeds, cooking oil, and fuel.

Humanitarian aid for Rakhine – and indeed all parts of Myanmar – is urgently needed. The UN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Bangladesh, India, and the wider international community, particularly the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, and Australia, must pressure the Myanmar regime to allow humanitarian aid agencies unimpeded and unlimited access.

But at the same time, they must provide funding for urgent cross-border aid to reach Myanmar’s most vulnerable—the internally displaced people and those at most risk of famine along the country’s borders. If that means working in unconventional ways, such as providing cash to local grassroots civil society groups that can deliver such aid to those who need it, then do it.

I know many of those local community groups who have been doing this work for decades. I know they can be trusted to be transparent, accountable, efficient, and effective if they are empowered to do so.

The UNDP is right that ultimately, as its report puts it, “only a comprehensive political settlement of the Myanmar crisis will eventually address the structural issues underlying the Rakhine crisis, as well as those affecting the rest of the country.”

Wignaraja says the crisis is “much larger than a famine. It’s a political disaster and a collapse. It needs an all-out politically mediated settlement – which has to be the rest of the world coming together.”

She added that the lack of international attention to Myanmar was “very, very troubling given the intensity of what’s going on.”

She is right about that. That is why, as I argued last week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres needs to step up and show moral leadership. Wignaraja ought to help nudge him and awaken him from his siesta. He is her boss, after all.

But a word of caution, too.

The UN, ASEAN and other regional players are rather too prone to compromise with murderous dictatorships in the interests of solving crises. I share Wignaraja’s desire to end the humanitarian crisis and agree that it requires a political solution with the involvement of the international community.

Yet that solution cannot be a fudge or a compromise. The current criminal, illegitimate regime has crossed so many red lines that it cannot ever be part of the solution or part of Myanmar’s future.

Any durable future must entail the military returning to barracks and being under democratically elected civilian oversight. Every policy by the international community must aim at that goal.

Ultimately, the only solution is the demise of the current criminal, illegitimate regime, the establishment of a genuine multi-party and multi-ethnic federal democracy, and the establishment of a genuine peace process throughout the country based on truth and reconciliation, justice and respect for human rights for all.

That is the longer-term, overarching, and most important solution. But in the meantime, as the UN report puts it, immediate action is needed to prevent a severe famine that would be “a crisis within a crisis,” triggering wider regional ramifications.

We must not add a further two million deaths from starvation to Myanmar’s already sickeningly large death toll. As I have argued for more than three years in almost every article I have written and every speech or interview I have given, we must provide lifelines to Myanmar’s people before it is too late.

source : uca news