Guest contributor
Kirt Mausert
Alan Clements has replied in DVB to my essay on his open letter to the U.N. Special Envoy, Julie Bishop. His reply, “History, conscience, and the unfinished struggle for Myanmar’s freedom,” opens with the humanitarian principle that animated his first letter.
Clements writes that what struck him in the response to his appeal “was not disagreement over the humanitarian request itself.” He is correct. That demand was granted in the second sentence of my essay: “That demand is just. No detainee should vanish into state secrecy.”
Yet several paragraphs of his reply proceed as if humanitarian principles were being contested, the rights of detainees rehearsed against an opponent who already affirmed them.
The agreed ground is thereby inflated; the contested ground shrinks. The contested ground was specific institutional conduct under the civilian government Clements is defending, and his reply does not engage it.
My essay named five specific acts of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) government during the period at issue:
In December 2016, as the military’s “area clearance operations” were underway, the State Counsellor’s Office Information Committee — her office, for which she was responsible — published its “Fake Rape” banner, denying mass sexual violence by soldiers in real time.
This was never retracted or addressed by her or her office.
The civilian apparatus prosecuted Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the Reuters reporters who documented the Inn Din massacre, under the Official Secrets Act, and kept them imprisoned longer than the soldiers they had exposed.
Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye told the BBC the Rohingya were burning their own villages, and addressed refugees as “Bengali” to their faces — and now, as a sitting National Unity Government (NUG) minister, accounts for his record by the same constitutional-constraints defense offered on Suu Kyi’s behalf.
In December 2019, the defense of Myanmar against the charge of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was led by Suu Kyi personally.
And in November 2020, the civilian government disenfranchised Rohingya voters.
Clements’ reply engages none of the five on their merits. Four it does not address at all. The fifth — the ICJ defense — it addresses by substitution.
In place of the rest, it offers two general arguments: that an insurgency supplies a chronology the critics ignore, and that the civilian government lacked the power its critics impute to it.
Both are worth taking in turn, because both, examined, return the argument to exactly the ground the reply was meant to leave.
Take the ICJ case first. My essay specified what was done at The Hague. She did not lodge a procedural objection to the court’s jurisdiction. She affirmatively denied genocidal intent, characterized the clearance operations as a legitimate response to terrorism, and asked the court to leave any violations to Myanmar’s own military justice system. None of these are contested facts.
In place of it, the reply offers: “Many people within Myanmar understood her appearance at The Hague differently. They saw a national leader attempting to defend her country from complete international isolation while preserving an already fragile democratic opening.”
This is the reply’s recurring method — to answer what was done with how it was received.
Others from Myanmar understood the appearance very differently — the Rohingya in the world’s largest refugee settlement foremost, and the democracy movement’s own most consistently principled voices. Their exclusion is Clements’ move.
On the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), Clements makes his most concrete argument: that it was “an armed insurgent organization designated as a terrorist group by Myanmar authorities following coordinated attacks on police and military outposts,” and that “chronology matters.” Two things about this.
First, the chronology. The major ARSA attacks occurred on October 9, 2016 and August 25, 2017. None of the five acts I named is a military response to either; each is a civilian communicative, judicial, or diplomatic act, on which a security emergency has no bearing.
And the chronology runs the wrong way regardless: the “Fake Rape” banner came in December 2016, after the October attacks Clements places on the timeline. The 2019 appearance at The Hague lies furthest from any attack; no event of 2016 or 2017 reaches it at all.
Taken seriously, Clements’ chronology does not rescue the conduct; it confirms that the conduct came after the trigger he points to. The substitution returns when he adds that the attacks were “perceived as a serious security crisis,” a perception that “existed” and shaped the environment.
But that perception was not weather the civilian government stood under. It was weather it made.
The December 2016 “Fake Rape” banner is the manufacture of precisely the perception now offered by Clements as its context.
Second, the designation. The terrorist designation Clements cites was issued by the Anti-Terrorism Central Committee on August 25, 2017 — the same day as the attacks, with the formal approval of the Union Government, and published on the State Counsellor’s Office’s own website, where it remains archived.
The civilian government Clements is defending did not concur in the designation. It hosted it.
The accompanying press release directed the media to call ARSA “terrorists” rather than “insurgents.” Clements writes in 2026 using the language prescribed in 2017 by the office whose conduct is at issue, as if that language were external to the apparatus on trial. It was not. It is the apologetic grammar’s own footprint, and the footprint is on the State Counsellor’s Office’s web archive for anyone to see.
The reply’s other general argument is that the civilian government lacked power — the military held the security ministries, kept its economic empire, remained a state within a state. This is true, and my essay said so: the case “does not depend on the constitutional powers she lacked.”
I never claimed she commanded the Western Command. The constraints explain what the civilian government could not do; they say nothing about what it did do — publish the “Fake Rape” banner, prosecute reporters, personally lead the delegation to The Hague, and so on.
And the argument is answered outright by a single act which belongs solely to Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian administration: in November 2020 — four years after the principal atrocities, with the genocide case already before the ICJ — the NLD government disenfranchised Rohingya voters.
No general ordered it; the attacks Clements cites lay years in the past; no clause of the 2008 constitution required it. It was the single freest choice the civilian government ever made about the Rohingya, and it chose dispossession.
That was not coup-prophylaxis. It was alignment.
One word conspicuously does not appear in Clements’ reply. Genocide. Not in reference to the case currently being adjudicated at the ICJ, not in reference to the 2020 resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, not in reference to the U.S. State Department’s 2022 determination.
What appears in its place is “the Rohingya crisis,” a formulation that names the people affected rather than the act — or the state, military and elected government alike, that perpetrated it. The elected civilian government and its leader Clements is defending presided over a genocide. Refusing to name it does not unmake it.
Clements ends on “the discipline of complexity, the humility to acknowledge uncertainty where uncertainty exists, and the wisdom to recognize that history is not served by reducing human lives to indictments.” The word is worth taking back.
The discipline of complexity is what an account does when it names specific institutional actions and traces their functions — not what evades them. To answer a piece that names five such actions by engaging the substance of none is not complexity, but calculated curation.
History is not served by reducing a life to an indictment. Neither is it served by curating one into an alibi.
The full sourced version of this argument, including the material Clements does not engage, is at Yangon Informer.
Kirt Mausert is a doctoral candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He lived and worked in Myanmar from 2010 to 2017, when he was blacklisted by the NLD government — in the same period as the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Yanghee Lee — for naming its complicity in the genocidal violence against the Rohingya.
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