Facebook’s Role in the Rohingya Crisis. An Approach to Viral Grievances according to Collier and Hoeffler

Exposé Écrit pour un Séminaire / Cours , 2022 , 11 Pages , Note: 1,7

Politique - Sujet: Paix et Conflits, Sécurité

This paper investigates Facebook’s role in the Rohingya crisis. The term Rohingya is widely used to name the Muslim ethnic minority in Rakhine (also known as Arakan) State, Myanmar. Myanmar, with its prevalently Buddhist population, systematically oppressed the group (for example Rohingyas are denied citizenships, which makes it impossible for the Rohingyas to enjoy the state’s welfare system, etc.).

In respond to this maltreatment, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked several police stations in the Rakhine state in 2017. Myanmar’s armed forces retaliated with atrocities against the Rohingya Muslim minority so fiercely and brutally, that even the extra funded UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM) reasoned that there was genocidal interest in Myanmar’s so-called anti-terrorist actions. In 2019, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees were counted in the neighboring Bangladesh. The genocide and other mass atrocities are still on-going.

Content

1. Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Conflict

2. An approach to viral ‘Grievances’
2.1. The ‘Grievance’ Thesis by Collier and Hoeffler
2.2. ‘Grievances’ of Buddhist Nationalists towards Rohingyas (via Facebook)
2.3. Subsumption of the ‘Grievance Model’ to the case of Myanmar

3. Conclusion and recommended course of action

1. Facebook’s role in the Rohingya Conflict

The term ‘Rohingya’ is widely used to name the Muslim ethnic minority in Rakhine (aka Arakan) State, Myanmar.¹ Myanmar, with its prevalently Buddhist population, systematically oppressed the group (e.g., Rohingyas are denied citizenships, which makes it impossible for the Rohingyas to enjoy the state’s welfare system, etc.).[i] In respond to this maltreatment, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked several police stations in the Rakhine state in 2017. Myanmar’s armed forces retaliated with atrocities against the Rohingya Muslim minority so fiercely and brutally, that even the extra funded UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM) reasoned that there was genocidal interest in Myanmar’s “anti-terrorist actions”. In 2019, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees were counted in the neighboring Bangladesh.[ii] The genocide and other mass atrocities are still on-going.

In late 2021, Rohingya refugees filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc (erstwhile Facebook) for $150 billion. Class-action complaints filed in both the USA and in the UK argue that the company fails in containing anti-Rohingya hate speech (in due course), which results in broader dissemination of misinformation and inflammation of violence against the ethnic minority. The U.S. accusation refers to more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images with racial and/or anti-Muslimism content. Many of those posts use dehumanizing language (a clear indicator for an imminent genocide![iii]) and call for violent actions against the Rohingyas – the vast majority is written in the local language Burmese and some posts are even published by official accounts of high-ranked military staff or politicians. The contains in these posts clearly violate Facebook’s own community standards, nevertheless the company fails notoriously at deleting the regarding posts due to insufficient artificial intelligence (AI) detection and (Burmese speaking) staff.[iv]

Even when posts are notified by other users as hate speech, the social media platform reacts too slowly in deleting the respective postings. Moreover, Facebook seems to utilize a double standard: While hate speech by Buddhist ultranationalists are poorly pursued, Rohingya Facebook users complained that their contributions of proving the military’s brutality and human rights violations are – in comparison to dangerous contents by extremist Buddhist Burmans – deleted very quickly.[v]

Facebook vowed improvement by setting up a Burmese-language based AI and speaking team, as well as by blocking members of the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) and by taking action towards racial and hatred-based ‘Fake News’.[vi]

One may ask oneself why Facebook out of all social media platforms was sued? While Facebook may have lost its popularity and importance significantly in the contemporary West, this is by far not the case in Myanmar.

Due to the extremely strict pre-publication censorship under the military government until 2012, the Burmese population is unaccustomed to an unrestrained press and to a critical approach towards ‘new’ posts on social media platform. Facebook’s quasi monopoly on Myanmar’s new press can be explained by considering that most Burmese citizens were able to acquire a cell phone with preloaded application (nominally Facebook) before they could afford a computer with ‘traditional’ internet browsers. Surprisingly often, Burmese smart phone users might react stunned when told the internet is way vaster than Facebook, or other applications which are already installed on their phones.[vii]

It is therefore justifiable for the IIFFMM to state, that “[a]s far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media” [viii] and that the platform played a “determining role” [ix] in preparing and conducting the genocide (Quotes of Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the IIFFMM, 2018)[x].

2. An approach to viral ‘Grievances’

2.1. The ‘Grievance’ Thesis by Collier and Hoeffler

A possible application of Collier and Hoeffler’s greed model has already been discussed quite exhaustively by Ware and Laoutides. Since these authors finally concluded that this thesis is hardly fitting to the Rakhine State’s current reality,[xi] this paper will use a grievance-based lens while approaching the conflict. Therefore, only the ‘Grievance model’ shall be explained in the following.

The grievance model assumes that a grievance-driven rebellion is more concerned with the correction of previous wrongdoings and injustices than personal and financial enrichment. Collier and Hoeffler list three motivations, which incline persons strong enough to enter protest and/or rebellion, ignoring possible government retaliations: inter-group hatred, political exclusion, and vengeance.[xii]

The first impetus, inter-ethnic or inter-religious hostilities, are presumably the most attractive for assumed causes of conflicts. Especially societies with a social fractionalization in two ethnic or religious collectives are likely to develop inter-group hatred (even more so when one group represents a vast majority of 45-90 percent of the population[xiii]). Is the population more diverse, the likelihood of an intrastate conflict decreases.[xiv]

Grievance can also be rooted in political exclusion. This either occurs when one group is heavily (politically) oppressed or when they face political marginalization and therefore economic injustice, since normally political involvement would facilitate an improvement of the group’s economic situation.[xv]

Lastly, (blood) vengeance and the urge to pay for preceding crimes and horrors committed by the other party, can be a vigorous motivation for taking up arms. This motive, howbeit, decreases over time.[xvi]

Yet, Collier and Hoeffler conclude that all three grievance approaches have little additional value in explaining a civil conflict.[xvii] The authors prefer to see subjective grievance as a social construct created by the rebels on purpose. They disagree to the view that grievance can be the very heart – or even a mere side effect – of the conflict. However, they concede to the ‘tillynian’ approach² that previous clashes foster the groups’ coherences.[xviii]

Many other scholars of the field have condemned this excessive asymmetry towards the greed model’s importance, saying that Collier’s and Hoeffler’s exclusive either-or approach therefore seems to be unrealistic.[xix] The argumentation in this paper is also pro-grievance based. Even if grievance may (never) be able to explain all dimensions of a conflict, is surely helpful to acquire a better understanding of the underlying causes of the respective collision.

2.2. ‘Grievances’ of Buddhist Nationalists towards Rohingyas (via Facebook)

This essay will focus on the ultra-nationalist movement, represented by the ‘Association for Protection of Race and Religion’ (in the following referred to as ‘MaBaTha’, its Burmese acronym) and on the Burmese government and military (also known as Tatmadaw). Historical grievances, like the Muslims’ dubious reputation of having been close allies to the British colonialists, are left out.[xx] Specifically, the role of Facebook posts in spreading the following grievances will be examined.

Grievances by the MaBaTha

The Buddhist ultranationalist movement appeared as a major player in the Rohingya conflict in 2012.[xxi] The movement and namely the MaBaTha address the deep-rooted fears of demographic changes and a therein following Islamization and identity loss of Myanmar.[xxii] The Burmese population, surrounded by states with an Islamic majority (Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia),[xxiii] consider themselves as guards of the “Western Gate” – based on a narrative which assumes that if Buddhists in Rakhine do not stand their ground against the Muslims, the entire country and finally whole South East Asia would become Islamic. Beneath the religious “Islamic threat”, ultranationalists picture Muslims as generally greedy, intolerant towards other faiths and intrusive towards Buddhist women, who are forced to marry Muslim men. The Muslim minority is stylized as a dangerous and spreading disease within the Burmese society,[xxiv] even though the Muslim population represent mere five percent of Myanmar’s populace.³ [xxv]

The MaBaTha, which mostly consists of Buddhists monks and nuns,[xxvi] holds a special decisive role: most believers put more ethic and religious trust in their messages than in the (often halfhearted) attempts of the government to ease the interreligious tensions.[xxvii] [xxviii] Eminent monks and nuns fuel violent actions against Muslims (and against the Rohingyas particularly) by encouraging and ‘allowing’ the local Buddhist communities to do so in order to ‘defend’ their faith and race.[xxix]

For example, the ultranationalists requested from their fellow Buddhists to refrain to boycott Muslim-owned shops. Specific stickers with Buddhists symbols made it possible to recognize an ‘allowed and good’ store.[xxx]

Another case of outbursts of the inflamed hatred is the erupted street fight between Buddhist and Muslim civilians, which ended with a fatality on each side. This happened after monk Ashin Wirathu, a notorious distributer of hate speech, shared an article about a Buddhist woman being raped by a Muslim man on Facebook. Blaming one individual directly and publishing the name of the accused person’s workplace, Wirathu called for justice to be taken. When the rape accusation was later verified as untrue, the harm was already done.[xxxi]

Grievances by Myanmar’s government and the Tatmadaw

The Burmese government and the military mostly profit from the ultranationalists’ anti-Muslimism hate propaganda. Occasionally, official Facebook accounts from Myanmar’s state institutions and private profiles of politicians spread the same dangerous contents as the MaBaTha.[xxxii] The offensives by the ARSA against Rakhine’s Border Guard Police were instrumentalized for framing all Muslims to practice a violent and extremist form of their religion.[xxxiii]

An example of this “collaboration” between the government and ultranationalists would be the shared use of the term ‘Bengali’ for the Rohingya, which let assume that the Rohingyas are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and therefore not licensed to live within Myanmar’s borders.[xxxiv]

One of the most striking and obvious misuses of official Facebook accounts was in 2016 when Aung San Suu Kyi’s reaction to accusation of several Rohingya women of being raped by the Tatmadaw. Although many international organizations report sexual violence as a common warfare strategy used by the Burmese military, Aung San Suu Kyi (in her role as State Counsellor and Foreign Minister of Myanmar) label those accusations as ‘FAKE RAPE”. This attitude at the highest state level reinforces the military to commit war crimes and atrocities, since the soldiers do not have any fear of being prosecuted for their actions.[xxxv]

Although an applicable Telecommunications Law menaces with penalty in money and imprisonment if one libels or slanders and/or imperils another person via social media, this norm is not utilized to prosecute religious and racial hatreds towards Muslims and Rohingyas.[xxxvi]

Even if government official would feel the urge to confront the anti-Muslim grudges and prejudices in their country, they would be reluctant to do so, since they would lose a significant number of voters in the next elections[xxxvii] [xxxviii] – not least because the MaBaTha would even more stigmatize the regime as a feeble guardian of Buddhism and thereby amplify its own influence.[xxxix]

In most cases, however, the motives and narratives of the Buddhist nationalists and the Burmese government overlap. The circulating hate speech posts on Facebook therefore benefit the politicians and militaries in justifying their atrocities against the Rohingyas.[xl] [xli]

Neither can be much help expected by the common Burmese citizens since they are chiefly biased by the one-sided newsgathering, informing them only about the Rohingyas’ crimes against Buddhists and Hindus.[xlii]

This leads to the sad conclusion that – after the UN Security Council was blocked by China in this matter[xliii] - Facebook seems to be the only persona which could have a positive impact on the Rohingya genocide.

2.3. Subsumption of the ‘Grievance Model’ to the case of Myanmar

In order to subsume in how far Collier and Hoeffler’s grievance model is well suited to gain a better understanding of the resentments towards the Rohingyas, the three grievance motivations shall be discussed.

Starting with the motive of denied political inclusion, the most striking deficiency of Collier and Hoeffler’s work becomes apparent; both the greed and the grievance model have been designed to explain rebellious uprisings by a minority. Therefore, one might be able to argue that political exclusion has been a motivation to form the ARSA. This argument, however, cannot be used for our case since the grievance-holding majority even forms the government.

The second impetus of exerting vengeance potentially makes more sense, if seen from an ultranationalist’s point of view. Some demand revenge for past atrocities committed by the Muslims. Howbeit as a neutral observer it becomes clear quickly, that most of the accusations are purposely inflated or constructed. Also, - divergently form the original grievance model – the motivation seems to be more the fear of a nationwide Muslim future, rather than considerations of the past.

[...]

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¹ The name ‘Rohingya‘ is an extremely controversial term in modern Myanmar. It is a self-description of Rakhine’s Muslim ethnic minority. Myanmar’s government refer to the same group as ‘Bengalis’, implying their alleged Bangladesh immigrant background (source: The Irrawaddy (2017). Analysis: Using the Term ‘Rohingya’.).

In this paper the term ‘Rohingya’ is used albeit the controversy in Myanmar, since the conflict became globally known under this name and a more unbiased name is still missing.

² Charles Tilly presented in his essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” (see bibliography) the idea that war creates or at least supports the creation of a nation-state by unifying the population against a common enemy and by empowering government institutions and taxation.

³ It is important to note, that there are more Muslims in Myanmar than the Rohingyas. Even though their political situation is better than that the one of the Muslims in Rakhine, the Islamophobic hate speech on social media also affects these people harshly.

• Université: Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
• Note: 1,7
• Auteur: Thalita Müller (Auteur)
• Année de publication: 2022
• Pages: 11
• N° de catalogue: V1316020
• ISBN (PDF): 9783346794178
• Langue: anglais
• mots-clé: Rohingya, Facebook, Collier and Hoeffler, Grief and Grievance, hate speech, dangerous speech, MaBaTha, Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s, Meta Platforms Inc