Why No Humanitarian Intervention in the Rohingya Crisis? A Political Alignment Between the West and China

This paper aims to address an empirical puzzle in the study of humanitarian crisis and intervention. It is: although both the United Nations and the US government have pointed to an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Rohingya Muslims in the western state of Rakhine in Myanmar by the country’s military force, resulting in a mass exodus of more than 645,000 Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh, and there is evidence of the systematic use of sexual violence against women by Myanmar’s armed force in violation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008), which declares that “rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide”, why is there no humanitarian intervention in the country to cease the violence against the ethnic and religious minorities? Why do Western powers not employ the notions of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) and ‘protection of civilians’ to intervene in Myanmar’s harrowing humanitarian catastrophe, believed to be the most severe and the worse since the Rwandan genocide of 1994? We examine several hypotheses concerning the dearth of intervention in this paper. Does it indicate that Western powers no longer find humanitarian intervention feasible and effective for addressing humanitarian emergencies in a third state, and that humanitarian assistance is instead deemed more appropriate? Can it be attributable to the growth of far-right nationalism in the West which echoes the anti-Rohingya Muslim movement in Myanmar? Do Western powers accept Myanmar’s official claims, which are also overwhelmingly supported by the majority Buddhist population, that the crackdown was a legitimate counter-terrorism operation against the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) after its August 2017 ‘terrorist’ attacks on government’s security posts and that the Rohingyas are illegal immigrants from the old Indian province of Bengal? Or is it due to China’s threat to veto external intervention in Southeast Asia which borders it? We argue that humanitarian intervention is not on the political agenda because China’s concern over the political cost of saving Muslim ‘strangers’ coincides with that of the West. This unprecedented political alignment sounds the death knell for humanitarian intervention in the Rohingya crisis and beyond.