UN Security Council must revisit Rohingya issue

THE UN Security Council's response to the current Rohingya crisis is a disappointment. Its decision last week to issue a mere statement hardly squares with the scale of the disaster unfolding in plain sight of the world. As of this week, some 400,000 refugees have flooded into Bangladesh. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, when asked whether the situation is tantamount to ethnic cleansing, said: "When one-third of the Rohingya population has got to flee the country, can you find a better word to describe it?"

Yet, after a closed-door session, the council limited itself to expressing "concern" about the expulsion and called for "immediate" steps to end the violence. Clearly, the plight of the Rohingya has been subordinated to great power interests - in this case, China. It even ensured that the statement did not require Napyidaw to take back all the refugees. Thus Beijing has become the enabler of Myanmar's military.

Of course, there can be no surprise that Beijing prefers to back Myanmar's generals, who retain huge powers over the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Beijing knows that the Myanmar government's most powerful agencies - internal security, border matters and military affairs (including budgets and remunerations) - remain under military control. In fact, no elected official can even examine the military budget, regardless of which party controls the government. And, as many critics have pointed out: Myanmar's Constitution is designed to be impossible to change without military approval; 25 per cent of seats in the legislative assembly are set aside for military officers, and any change to the charter needs a super-majority of more than more than 75 per cent of the legislature. Worse, a very broadly couched clause also empowers the generals to re-impose military rule if they judge - on their sole authority and at their sole discretion - that the country is on the verge of disorder.