Why is The Gambia Taking Myanmar to the International Court of Justice?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Have the names Myanmar and The Gambia ever appeared in the same sentence? It would be a rare occurrence. They are about as far apart and different as two countries can be.

Myanmar, or Burma, is a large Buddhist state of 55.3 million people in southeast Asia, bordering India, Bangladesh, Laos, China, and Thailand, and facing the Bay of Bengal on the Indian Ocean.

The Gambia, the smallest country on the African mainland, is almost entirely surrounded by Senegal, and facing the Atlantic Ocean. Its two million people are made up of at least nine major ethnic groups, a majority of them Sunni Muslims.

Other than both being members of the United Nations, they are not part of any common economic, military or political alliances or organizations. The two countries don’t even have diplomatic relations.

So what has changed? It involves the ongoing troubles faced by the Muslim Rohingya people in Myanmar.

The Rohingya are a Bengali-speaking ethnic minority who live mainly in the northern region of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, bordering Bangladesh. Numbering around one million in Myanmar at the start of 2017, they are one of the many ethnic minorities in the country and represent its largest percentage of Muslims.

But the government of Myanmar in 1982 stripped the Rohingya of citizenship and even excluded them from the 2014 census. It considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The most recent problems began in August 2017 after Rohingya militants launched deadly attacks on more than 30 police posts.

Myanmar troops, backed by Buddhist mobs, in turn began to burn Rohingya villages and attacking civilians. At least 6,700 Rohingya, including at least 730 children under the age of five, were killed in the month after the violence broke out, according to medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières.

Soon a massive exodus of Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh began,, as more than 730,000 Rohingya fled the country. They continue to languish in massive refugee camps there.

On Nov. 11, The Gambia filed a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against its Rohingya minority, drawing praise from human rights groups and Rohingya activists.

The case was brought on behalf of other Muslim countries in the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

“The aim is to get Myanmar to account for its action against its own people: the Rohingya,” Gambian Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou told a news conference.

In 2003, Tambadou had left The Gambia to join the Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he spent more than a decade prosecuting some of the genocide’s most notorious figures.

For Tambadou, what he saw and heard when he travelled to Bangladesh jogged some painful memories. “I saw genocide written all over these stories,” he said in an interview in The Gambia’s capital, Banjul. “It sounded very much like the kind of acts that were perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda.”

Tambadou told the court that “All that The Gambia asks is that you tell Myanmar to stop these senseless killings, to stop these acts of barbarity that continue to shock our collective conscience, to stop this genocide of its own people.”

He requested that the ICJ hearing approve temporary measures to protect the Rohingya.

Myanmar’s leader and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Ky also testified and denied the allegations made against her country’s troops, who, she maintained, were engaged in legitimate counterterrorism operations.

In a unanimous decision, the Court ordered Myanmar to carry out emergency “provisional” measures, intervening in the country’s domestic affairs by instructing her government to respect the requirements of the 1948 genocide convention.

“I think this represents a triumph of international law and international justice. And it is the international community -- as represented by the ICJ -- saying in the strongest of terms that genocide will not be accepted under any circumstances by any perpetrators,” Tambadou stated after the decision.

The only reason the plight of the Rohingya is even on the international agenda is because of the tiny West African country.

However, a final ruling by the ICC may be years away. The UN Security Council on Feb. 4 also failed to take any action.