Earlier this week, I listened to the Turkish First Lady, the wife of the
Prime Minister, Emine Erdogan, speak about her recent harrowing visit
to the Rohingya people in the the federal state of Arakan (formerly now
known as Rakhine) who are located in northwestern Burma (aka Myanmar).
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority numbering over one million, long
victimized locally and nationally in Burma and on several occasions over
the years their people have been brutally massacred and their villages
burned. She spoke in a deeply moving way about this witnessing of acute
human suffering shortly after the most recent bloody episode of communal
violence in June of this year. She lamented that such an orgy of
violence directed at an ethnic and religious minority by the Buddhist
majority is almost totally ignored by most of the world, and is quietly
consigned by media outlets to their outermost zones of indifference and
irrelevance. She especially appealed to the women present to respond
with activist compassion, stressing that women are always the most
victimized category in these extreme situations of minority persecution
and ethnic cleansing.
The situation of the Rohingya is an
archetypal example of acute vulnerability in a state-centric world. In
1982 the territorial government of Burma stripped away the citizen
rights of the impoverished Rohingya Muslims who have lived in Arakan for
many generations, but are cynically claimed by Rangoon to be unlawful
new migrants from bordering Bangladesh who do not belong in Burma and
have no right to remain or to burden the state or cause tension by their
presence. Bangladesh, in turn, itself among the world’s poorest
countries, already has 500,000 Rohingya who fled across the Burmese
border after earlier attacks on their communities, and has closed its
borders to any further crossings by those escaping persecution,
displacement, destruction of their homes and villages, and threats to
their lives. To deepen this aspect of the tragedy, only 10% of these
migrants who fled from Burma have been accepted as ‘refugees’ by the UN
High Commission of Refugees, and the great majority of the Rohingya
living in Bangladesh for years survive miserably as stateless persons
without rights and living generally at or even below subsistence levels.
The Rohingya who continue to exist precariously within Arakan are
stateless and unwanted, many are reported to wish openly for their own
death. As a group they endure hardships and deprivations in many forms,
including denial of health services, educational opportunity, and normal
civil rights, while those who have left for the sake of survival, are
considered to be comparatively fortunate if they manage to be accepted
as ‘refugees’ even if their status as undocumented refugees means the
absence of minimal protection, the denial of any realistic opportunity
for a life of dignity, and the terrifying uncertainties of being at the
continuing mercy of a hostile community and an inhospitable state.
The
principal purpose of this educational conference sponsored by
Mazlumder, a Turkish NGO with strong Muslim affinities, was to gather
experts to report on the situation and urge the audience to take action
and thereby mobilize public opinion in support of the Rohingya people.
It served to reinforce the high profile diplomatic and aid initiatives
undertaken in recent months by the Turkish government to relieve the
Rohingya plight. It also called attention to the strange and
unacceptable silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, the widely admired democratic
political leader in Burma, herself long placed under punitive house
arrest by the ruling military junta and recipient of the 1991 Nobel
Peace Prize honoring her heroic resistance to dictatorship in her
country. Her voice on behalf of justice for Burmese ethnic and religious
minorities, and especially for the Rohingya, would carry great weight
among Buddhists in the country and with world public opinion, and might
shame the government into taking appropriate action. As it is, the
present Burmese leadership and the prevailing tendency in domestic
public opinion is to view the conflict as intractable, with preferred
solutions being one or another version of ethnic cleansing, a crime
against humanity—either forced deportation or the distribution of the
Rohingya throughout the country so as to destroy their identity as a
coherent people with deep historical roots in northern Arakan. Outside
pressures from Saudi Arabia and the United States might help to rally
wider international concern, especially if tied to Burma’s economic
goals. Aside from Turkey, governments have been reluctant to put
pressure on Rangoon in this period because the Rangoon leadership has
softened their dictatorial style of governance and seem to be moving
toward the establishment of constitutional democracy in the country.
What
struck me while listening to the presentations at the conference was
how powerful language can become when its role is to think with the
heart. I have always found that women are far less afraid to do this in
public spaces than men. We fully secular children of the European
Enlightenment are brainwashed from infancy, taught in myriad ways that
instrumental reason and logical analysis are the only acceptable ways to
think and express serious interpretations of societal reality. Mrs.
Erdogan not only thinks with her heart, but she infuses such thought
with an obvious religious consciousness that conveys a spiritual
commitment to empathy that neither needs nor relies upon some sort of
rational justification.
Such a powerful rendering of suffering
reminded me of James Douglass’s use of the realm of the ‘unspeakable’
(in turn inspired by the Catholic mystic author and poet, Thomas Merton)
to address those crimes that shock our conscience but can only be
diminished in their magnitude by speech. Their essential horror cannot
be comprehended by expository language even if it is emotively
heightened by an inspirational appeal. Only that blend of thinking with
the heart combined the existential validation of direct witnessing can
begin to communicate what we know, in the organic sense of knowing, to
be the reality. I have discovered in my attempt to address the
Palestinian ordeal as honestly as possible that direct contact with the
actualities of occupation and the experience of listening closely to
those who have been most directly victimized is my only way to
approximate the existential reality. For this reason, my exclusion by
Israel from visiting Occupied Palestine in my UN role does not affect
the rational legal analysis of the violation of Palestinian rights under
international law, but it does diminish my capacity as a witness to
touch the live tissue of these violations, and erodes my capacity to
convey to others a fuller sense of what this means for the lives and
wellbeing of those so victimized. Of course, UN reports are edited to
drain their emotive content in any event.
I recall also my
experience with the world media after a 1968 visit to Hanoi in the midst
of the Vietnam War. I had been invited by a European lawyers’
organization to view the bomb damage in North Vietnam at a time when
American officials, especially the Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara, were claiming ‘the most surgical strikes in the history of air
warfare.’ I accepted this ‘controversial’ invitation to visit ‘the
enemy’ during an ongoing war, although the fighting was somewhat paused
at the time, as ‘a realist’ opponent of the war, basically accepting the
position of Bernard Fall, George Kennan, and Hans Morgenthau that it
was a losing proposition to suppose that the U.S. could achieve what the
French colonial occupying power was unable to do and that it was a
costly diversion of resources and attention from more important security
concerns. My experience in Hanoi transformed my understanding and
outlook on the war. It was a result of meeting many of the leaders,
including the Prime Minister on several occasions, visiting bombed
villages, talking with peasants and ordinary Vietnamese, and most of
all, realizing the total vulnerability of the country to the military
superiority of the United States with no prospect of retaliation—the
concrete and cumulative terror of being on the receiving end of
one-sided war that continues for years. I came away from North Vietnam
convinced that ‘the enemy,’ and especially its people, was on the right
side of history, and the United States, and the badly corrupted Saigon
regime that it propped up, was on the wrong side; above all, I felt the
pain of the Vietnamese and was moved by their courage, humanity, and
under the dire circumstances, their uncanny faith in humanity and their
own collective destiny as a free nation. It produced a sea change in my
mindset concerning the Vietnam War, and ever since.
When I left
Vietnam, and returned to Paris, I received lots of attention from
mainstream media, but total disinterest from these prominent journalists
in what was for me the most important outcome of the trip—the
realization of what it meant humanly for a peasant society to be on the
receiving end of a high tech war machine of a distant superpower whose
homeland was completely outside what is now being called ‘the hot
battlefield.’ The journalists had no interest in my (re)interpretation
of the war, but they were keenly eager to report on proposals for
ending the conflict that had been entrusted to me by Vietnamese leaders
to convey to the United States Government upon my return. It turned out
that the contour of these proposals was more favorable from Washington’s
point of view than what was negotiated four years and many deaths later
by Henry Kissinger, who ironically received a Nobel Peace Prize for his
questionable efforts. My main reflection relates back to the Arakan
meeting. The media is completely deaf to the concerns of the heart, and
is only capable of thinking, if at all, with the head. It limits thought
to what can be set forth analytically, as if emotion, law, and morality
are irrelevant to forming an understanding of public events. What at
the time interested the New York Times and CBS correspondents, who were
sympathetic and intelligent individuals, was the shaping of a diplomatic
bargain that might end the war, whether it was a serious proposal, and
whether Washington might be interested. It turned out that Washington
was not ready for even such a favorable compromise, and plodded on for
several years, culminating in the unseemly withdrawal in 1975 in the
setting of a thinly disguised surrender.
Poets in the West,
caught between a cultural insistence on heeding the voice of reason and
their inability to transfer feelings and perceptions into words, vent
their frustration with language as the only available vehicle for
truth-telling. As T.S. Eliot memorably expressed it in the final section
of his great poem East Coker:
Trying to use words, and every
attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Imagine
if the master poet of the English language in the prior century gives
voice to such feelings of defeat (paradoxically in one of the great
modern poems), how must the rest of us feel! We who are mere journeymen
of the written word fault ourselves for inadequacies of depictions and
usually lack the temerity to blame the imperfect medium of language for
the shortcomings of efforts to communicate that which eludes precise
expression.
Earlier in the same poem Eliot writes some lines
that make me wonder if I have not crossed a line in the sands of time,
and should long ago have taken refuge in silent vigil:
…..Do
not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their
folly
