Episode 60. Myanmar and the Persecution of the Rohingya with General Anthony Crutchfield and the Honorable Anne Richard

Episode Transcript:

 Deborah McCarthy: [0:13] From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is the General and the Ambassador. Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders to discuss their work together in advancing US national security interests overseas. I am Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, the producer and host.

 The General and the Ambassador is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy, in partnership with UNC Global, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today we will talk about Burma—or Myanmar, as it is also called—and the plight of its ethnic minorities, particularly the Rohingya. We will talk in the context of US diplomatic and military engagement with the country, and also in the context of US refugee policies. Our guests today are Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, who served as the deputy commander of the United States Pacific Command from 2014 to 2017, and the Hon. Anne Richard, who served as the Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration at the Department of State from 2012 to 2017. Welcome to The General and the Ambassador and thank you for joining us.

The issue of the Rohingya minority in Burma has received a lot of press attention, especially since 2017 when there was a renewed crackdown, and an estimated 700,000 fled to neighboring Bangladesh. For our listeners I will give a little bit of background on the country. Burma is the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia. It was under military rule from 1962 to 2011. In that year, the junta was dissolved, and the country began to take some steps to open up and reform its economy, though the military was still in control. It held its first real elections in 2015, and a new civilian president was installed in 2016. In 2020, new elections were held, and the party of long-time opposition leader, and Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory. As the new parliament was about to be sworn in, the military staged a coup and took power once again.

 Over the years, the UN and all major human rights organizations have issued reports documenting human rights violations in the country. Recently, a report published by the UN accused Burma’s military of carrying out mass killings and rapes with “genocidal intent.” A case was filed in the International Court of Justice against the country, and in January 2020 the Court ordered Burma to take emergency measures to protect the Rohingya from being persecuted and killed.

 Anne, you know the region well having travelled there many times over the years to visit the refugee camps. How long has there been a refugee crisis in the general area?

 Anne Richard: [3:04] Many people who work on Asia remember the Indo-Chinese refugee crises that followed the Vietnamese War, where people who had worked closely with the United States in South Vietnam fled the country when it was clear that their cause was lost and that the North Vietnamese would be in charge. And, similarly, people from neighboring countries also, who worked with the US, sometimes fled.

 My first trip was in the early 1990s, and I was visiting Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. Later, I visited camps for Burmese minorities who were persecuted by the military regime. That was the third major influx of refugees into Thailand. There’s been a lot of aid workers and government officials who’ve worked on refugee issues, who’ve put time in, in Southeast Asia.

 Deborah McCarthy: [3:54] Related to that, within Burma, who are the Rohingya, and what is the reason for their long-time persecution?

 Anne Richard: [4:03] The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in a country that is 90% Buddhist. Some families have lived there for centuries. Some families came during the colonial era, when the British, of course, were a big presence in South Asia. They are persecuted by the Burman majority of the population. They are living in this Rakhine State that is up against the side of Bangladesh, if I can describe it that way.

 One of the things that was explained to me was that Rakhine State, which is composed of these Rohingya but also many Buddhists, is not a prosperous place, and that people in the rest of Burma had always kind of looked down their nose—not only on the Rohingya, but also at the Buddhists living in that part of the country. It was a place where there were a lot of grievances, and a lot of unhappiness. There were frictions between the Rakhine Buddhists and the Rohingya living there. The Rohingya have become, over time, stateless. They are not seen as citizens of the country of Burma.

 One of the things that was interesting in all of our conversations when we were visiting in January of 2015, was that there was an opening of the country to talk more, be in dialogue more, with formerly oppressed minorities in Burma, and there was talk of embracing a hundred different ethnicities in the country. But the one big exception were the Rohingya. The people we met with who were interested in peace negotiations and peace agreements to bring the whole country together did not include the Rohingya in those conversations, and did not intend to do that.

Deborah McCarthy: [5:47] I wanted to ask you, Tony, since the 1960s, Burma has been embroiled also in a low-grade civil war between the military and over twenty ethnic armed organizations. The Rohingya did not have an armed organization, but in 2017 what is called the “Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army” appeared and launched a series of coordinated attacks on security outposts along the Bangladesh border. What can you tell us about these groups, and does the existence now of a Rohingya armed organization factor into the Burmese military’s actions towards this group?

Anthony Crutchfield: [6:27] The short answer to that question is yes, and from my point of view, a lot of this distrust—I saw that when I was there with Anne, and talked to the minority groups—I can sense the distrust in the room. I felt a little bit like that distrust might have been me in a military uniform, but as we began to speak to them I could see that they were a little more at ease and understood the reason that we were there. To me, that distrust, goes to a military-style or military-look—totally distrusted, on both sides, by the way. The military distrusts those groups; those groups distrust the military. And, when I had separate conversations with the military, they brought up exactly what you said: they see it as those armed groups attacking them. The minorities see the military attacking them. And both sides believe that they have been wronged, or that they are right. Until they are able to bridge that gap, I think that there will continue to be violence and bloodshed amongst both groups.

Deborah McCarthy: [7:43] And do these groups really threaten the military, or is it a low-lying conflict that’s constant? 

Anthony Crutchfield: [7:49] The groups that we’re talking about, that the Rohingya have, in no way would be able to out-match the national army. However, to me, it’s likened to a war of attrition, where they can inflict casualties, and those casualties—after they mount up—then there’s pressure on the government to ensure the violence doesn’t continue to happen.

 You know, I’ll tell you, just reading in the last couple of years, the national military has weaponry that far exceeds anything that these groups have. In fact, they use some of these. It’s like trying to kill a fly, you know, with a sledgehammer.

Deborah McCarthy: [8:28] Well, during the early, long military rule, the US Congress passed a number of sanctions to pressure the junta to stop repressing its people. The Obama administration began engaging with Burma’s military leaders, to push for a transfer to a civilian government, but they kept sanctions in place as leverage. When the junta finally left in 2011, the strategy seemed to shift to remove many but not all the sanctions to encourage further political and economic reforms. President Obama visited the country twice in 2012 and 2014. In a speech during his first visit, he spoke of the importance of civilian oversight over the military, of reconciliation, of religious and ethnic tolerance. So, let me start with you Tony, can you give our listeners a flavor of the power of the military?

Anthony Crutchfield: [9:20] The first thing I would say is that that is exactly what I felt my role was when we visited there several times. It was an outward vision, something that they could see, where the United States military is subordinate to civilian control—just the way our Constitution has it. So, we wanted to not only make sure we were expressing that idea, but that we were showing them that idea in action. It just so happened that one of the times we went was the run-up to an [American] election. And I can remember, that just about every senior military officer, they would all ask me the same question, and that was, “Who do you want to win this election?” They asked me that many, many, many times, “Who do you want to win this election?” And here’s the answer that I gave them, and the expressions were much of disbelief. I don’t know if they just didn’t believe what I was saying I really meant, or they were in disbelief that a country could be this way. And this was the answer that I gave; I said, “First of all, we have a Constitution. I take an oath to that Constitution, to support that Constitution, and that Constitution says that we have a democratically elected government. The second thing is, as a citizen of the United States, I cast one vote. And I will cast that vote. But on the 20th of January, whoever is standing, taking the oath of office, is my president, whether it’s the person I voted for or not. That is my president, and my commander-in-chief.” It’s a concept that was very, very difficult for them to understand. And my role there was to not only express that, but be an outward symbol of that civilian control over the military, in our country.

Anne Richard: [11:09] You know, Deborah, the idea to have a second human rights dialogue building on a previous one that had been led by Michael Posner and had involved Samantha Power when she was at the National Security Council, the idea to have the second human rights dialogue between the US and Burma was Assistant Secretary Tom Malinowski’s. And he had already travelled with one inter-agency delegation that Tony Crutchfield was on, to Burma, and he was doing this a second time then, and I was invited along. Tom, who is now a congressman from New Jersey, explained to me the importance of having General Crutchfield, the number two at PACOM, along in the delegation. He said that the military was so much in charge in Myanmar and that they would respect an American military general, and that they would listen to him more, and that they would also then—potentially—be open to receiving some of these messages, about how a democracy is run, and about the proper role of the military. And so, we had not met before, we had not worked together before, but I saw the genius of having Tony Crutchfield along, because it was very, very clear, that the interest that the people we met with from the military had in everything he had to say.

 Deborah McCarthy: [12:34] And, Tony, you gave the very first speech by a US military leader at the Myanmar Military Academy. How were your messages greeted? Did they sit there stiffly at attention, or were you able to engage?

 Anthony Crutchfield: [12:48] Yes, they did. First of all, that was quite an honor for me to do that. Tom Malinowski and I went there to deliver the message. And the message was one of a democratically elected government that oversees its military, and that its military is there to protect that government, protect that Constitution, and protect the citizens and not hurt them. And the objective was—and I thought it was very valuable—so that school that we went to was probably officers at their mid-career point. These will be the senior officers of the national military structure. In my opinion, the people who were holding those senior offices, trying to get them to change the way they are is incredibly difficult if not impossible. However, if you get to the seed corn, and you get them to understand the concepts, when they get in those positions, then we will then see changes in the country. So that was the beauty of doing that engagement.

 They were all cordial. They certainly understood what I was trying to say. I’m not sure that all of them believed it. However, at the end I had several of them come up to me, one-on-one because they couldn’t engage publicly, came up to me one-on-one and thanked me and asked me more questions about it. So, I think it is permeating, it is getting through. But it’s going to take an awful lot of change for them to get the concept of that civilian control over the military rooted in what they do. It’s going to take more than one time doing it. This is something that has to continue: a military-to-military engagement is not a one-and-done. And, unfortunately, because of the way things turned out, we really lost that connective tissue over the last four-to-five years. It can’t be episodic. These kinds of engagements have to continue and can’t be an episodic thing for any meaningful change to take place.

 Anne Richard: [14:52] Well, I had sort of a parallel experience. My role on the trip was to talk about US immigration policy to the group of Burmese that were gathered. And, at first, I was baffled why I was being given this role, because my expertise is refugee policy, which is just one sub-set of foreign-born people who come to the US. I’m not an expert on the whole schema of immigration policy that the US has. And I kept asking myself, “Why are they asking me to do this?” And they said, “It’s your idea.” The Burmese Foreign Ministry representative, Tin Lin, was someone I had met at the UN at one of the high-level weeks, and in talking to him about being open to having a multi-ethnic society, I told him, “You should read a book about the United States and how we’re a country of immigrants and refugees.” Well, unbeknownst to me, he then went to a bookstore in New York City, bought what he called “the book” on immigration to the United States, read it, and got very excited. And so, he wanted me to explain immigration to the US, and how our country had been built on this phenomenon, to his colleagues in the foreign ministry.

 So how do you even begin to do this? So, what we did, which was kind of fun, was we tried to get them to guess who on our team had what ethnicity. And I remember saying to them, “Well, who on our side has an Argentinian mother?” And they were just completely confused. They had no idea! And we went down, sort of, the list, and what really stumped them was we said, “Who came from Poland as a child?” And they could not believe the head of our delegation, Tom Malinowski, had come as a refugee to the United States and was now leading our delegation. And then, the one that surprised me was it turned out there was a Native American on our delegation. And Tony, you can tell the audience who that was.

 Anthony Crutchfield: [16:43] Yeah, it was me. You know, interesting Anne, I remember when we were talking about that, and I said that: I have Native American heritage. And I specifically remember once I said that, I could sense the body language in that room, from those ethnic minorities change. I don’t know if you saw it, but I saw it.

 Anne Richard: [17:02] Well, several of them said, “Oh, we thought you were Burmese, or Thai.”

 Anthony Crutchfield: [17:06] I felt like, just by connecting in that way with them, the trust factor was kicking in and that they really were not only interested in what we were saying but they believed that what we were trying to do was good and noble. I really felt that way. I sensed it in the room.

 Anne Richard: [17:24] The piece of it that was disappointing for me was a lot of the people outside the foreign ministry left the room before we had that session. The foreign ministry types were there because their boss said they had to be. But they were very influenced by our conversation. And then, the other thing that shocked me was how unworldly they were. These were people who were living in a pariah state, did not travel overseas, did not communicate with the rest of the world very much—or if they did, it was in a very controlled way. To not know that America is made up of all these people of different ethnicities, that to me was astounding.

 Now, of course, we’re talking about a country which has once again gotten the military to take over, a lot of violence, the Rohingya have fled in very large numbers and are now living in Bangladesh. And very few remain in Burma. And the Bangladeshis don’t want them either. It seems like the little steps forward, the hopefulness we had at the time (which was really a hallmark of the whole Obama administration—there was a really keen, intense interest in Burma) has definitely suffered setbacks since then.

 Anthony Crutchfield: [18:32] I felt like we were making slow progress. And I do believe that it is something that has to be cultivated, it won’t happen on its own, and change is slow. I’ll give you a quick example of the latest coup attempt: there was a break in the military relationship, the co-com, INDOPACOM, had lost that connectivity, and had to re-engage and had to get that connectivity back just to have a conversation with the senior military leaders. Something where you feel that there was so much potential if we can just connect and continue that relationship, I certainly believe that things can improve, albeit it will be slow progress.

 Anne Richard: [19:17] I wrestled with this idea: did we fail in what we set out to do, especially in light of what we see now happening in the country? And, one of the things I saw that Congressman Malinowski was saying is that one reason we see protests now against the recent coup is that young people who’ve grown up in this past decade or so are not going to be willing to go backwards, that they have enjoyed this connection to the rest of the world, that they have enjoyed the freedoms that came with this very early democracy, and that they don’t want to see it go backwards.

 Deborah McCarthy: [19:54] Well, I want to ask a little bit about the tools we can use. Even when there was the opening under Obama, there weren’t many tools on the military side, where you were rather constricted and that continues to this day. And similarly, on the diplomatic side, we have had certain sanctions have taken place. And by the way, full disclosure, I worked with the team that helped take off some of the sanctions in the economic bureau, and we had to fight a lot of bureaucracies for that. But we continued to use the tool of sanctions, from the Trump administration into the Biden administration. This gets us to what tools we can use to have a sustained relationship, to keep the door sort of pried open.

 Anne Richard: [20:34] The way I saw it at the time was that the carrot was sanctions and reduced sanctions, the stick was the reimposition of sanctions, and that also we were trying to influence them with the power of our example. And that’s what the story of talking to them about the US multi-ethnic society, was about, talking to them about how a democracy is supposed to work, and you know the appropriate role of the military in a democracy.

 Anthony Crutchfield: [21:05] The mil-to-mil relationship, in my opinion, is one of the most powerful diplomatic tools that we have. And, in some cases, the mil-to-mil relationship might be the only diplomatic relationship we have in certain cases. We learned this when I was on active duty in Thailand, when the same thing happened in Thailand. We had a longstanding military-to-military relationship, and one of the things we took away after coup was the mil-to-mil relationship. It can be a bad thing when we break that tie, because it may be the only thing we have.

 In the case of Myanmar, we’re trying to build that tie. But how do you build that tie, without giving too much up front? Without seeing certain changes happen? On one part of the scale, you have, you know, on probably the upper part of that scale you have things that all militaries who want to be like the United States or you have foreign militaries sales or FMS. They begin to get the same tools that the US military has, which they want desperately. There’s all types of things you have to go through—to include Congress’ approval for those things. But the point is, most of these militaries who want to be like the United States, they respect the United States military and they want to be like the United States military. And so we can, at times, use that to our advantage to get them to change. But it’s very hard, and it’s very painstaking, and it’s very slow.

 Anne Richard: [22:28] Of course, for Congress, one of the big concerns they have is that we not sell or give weapons to countries where they’re going to take those weapons and turn them on their own people, and that’s why this issue of the military’s role in oppressing and persecuting minorities within the country, religious minorities and also just ethnic minorities, was so key. And another thing that the military was famous for, they were seen as very corrupt. This is a poor country, and my understanding was they were very much involved in smuggling precious minerals and timber out of the country to make money and to enrich themselves. Another concern is, of course, narcotics trafficking. A subset of our group went before the conversations with the Burmese up to Kachin State, to the town of Myitkyina, and we met with Christian leaders, we met with minority leaders. They all brought up the concerns about drug addiction in that part of Burma. And that had not been on my radar screen at all. I was quite shocked.  You know, we had our list of things we were concerned about, and their list—drug addiction and the effect of drugs on young people in that part of Burma—was their top issue to raise with us.

Anthony Crutchfield: [23:47] On corruption, I did see that. It is incredible. And it’s normal, to them. Here’s an interesting thing: I told you, they couldn’t understand the concept of civilian control over the military. It was hard for them to understand. Well, here is a concept that is hard for me to understand: I do not understand how a military could hurt its own population, and the citizens that they take an oath to protect. I could not understand that. I still can’t understand that. I also can’t understand how in some cases those same senior military not only the corruption and smuggling as you mentioned, Anne, but taking property from the people that they’re supposed to protect. That is just a concept that I cannot understand, as a person who wore the uniform, the cloth of our country for thirty-five years.

 Deborah McCarthy: [24:36] Well, Anne, you went to visit the Rakhine State where most of the Rohingya live, and you also visited camps in Bangladesh. What were the conditions that you found in both?

 Anne Richard: [24:46] I was fortunate to be able to go with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ staff—UNHCR, or the UN Refugee Agency’s staff—up to northern Rakhine State, and I saw the conditions under which the Rohingya were living at the time. Our trip started in Sittwe, which is sort of the capital of that area, and there were UN delegations staying in our hotel because there was so much intense interest in that situation up there. Some of the Rohingya lived in ghettos that had been set up, and they had been pushed out of their neighborhoods to live together in an enclosed area. Some Rohingya were living in their home villages, but these villages had become open-air prisons, because a Rohingya was not allowed to travel out of their village without permission from the police. They had to go to security forces and get permission to get married. They had to get permission to leave the country, which is almost never granted. In most of the families we visited, the young people—young men, especially, when they became a certain age—they would try to leave the country and go overseas. They would try to get to Bangladesh and then go on forward to other countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, to get work, so that they could help support their families.

 There was one village we visited that I will never forget, because a police officer had been murdered there under mysterious circumstances. No one knew who was responsible. The entire village was being punished. And we went and visited, and the thing I remember about it is, I have seen children all over the world, in good conditions and bad, I’ve seen them in filthy, muddy refugee camps, and kids are pretty much kids no matter their circumstances. They laugh. They play. They chase each other around. That’s the only place on Earth I’ve ever seen children just look so grim as they gathered and just looked at me. It was a really remarkable place on Earth. A very sad, tragic place on Earth.

 The Rohingya were being persecuted in their own country, and I was told by some that the Burmese government, the Myanmar government wanted to push them into the sea. We see that was no exaggeration. Now that we saw beginning in August of 2017, where hundreds of thousands fled the country because they were attacked by the military—and not just had their villages attacked, but women were raped, people were murdered, families were scattered. And so, this attempt to wipe them out, and drive them out, was horrible, and the other thing is, it was successful. Most of the Rohingya are now living in refugee camps in Bangladesh.

 There were some in Bangladesh already, at the time we are talking about, 2015. When I travelled there, what I found was that while the Bangladesh government had let them in, they were not then (and I think it’s still the same today) they’re not happy to have taken in so many refugees. The refugees live in very precarious situations. They live in huts that are made of bamboo and plastic sheeting. They’re on ridges of land that are very precarious. At the time I was shocked by kind of open-air sewers and little kids playing nearby. At that time there were maybe 32,000 registered refugees and another 100,000 who had sort of grown unregistered and unauthorized. And now, of course, there’s 880,000 refugees living in Bangladesh.

 So, one of the reasons I really care about the Rohingya so much: they are not seen as belonging anywhere. The Bangladesh government says, “These people are from Burma and should go back there.” In Myanmar, they say, “These people are Bengali. They do not belong here. They don’t even look like us.” To be a citizen of nowhere, to be not just a refugee but stateless, and to have no one even agree that you are allowed to stand on a plot of land anywhere on Earth—this is a really, really tragic situation to be in.

 Deborah McCarthy: [29:06] At the time you were engaged in this, there was also the issue of the boat people in South Asia in general, and there was a major conference on those people that included Rohingya, Bangladeshis and others.

 Anne Richard: [29:18] That’s right. Not long after the second human rights dialogue in January [2015], in May [2015] we saw that the Thai government decided to crack down on people smugglers. And so, when they decided to start arresting some of the big smuggling groups, all of a sudden in boats that were in the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, the crews all departed. They took boats, and they left. And they left the boats drifting at sea with people who were very vulnerable: some were being trafficked, some had paid to be smuggled. All were poor people hoping to get to Malaysia or onward and start life over again. And instead, they were just floating at sea.

 So, they had to be rescued, and they had to be brought ashore, and initially no country wanted them at all. The Thai government decided to have an international or regional conference about that in May of 2015. They really wanted an American Assistant Secretary to go. I agreed to go. I spoke on behalf of the US, but also on behalf of some of the UN’s humanitarian agencies to get their messages out and get them listened to, that we had to help these people.

 And I went on from there to Indonesia, to Malaysia. I visited and met with some of the boat people who had been brought ashore. They had been traumatized. In one detention center elsewhere in Southeast Asia, I met with a group of women who had been abandoned on some of these boats. They told me how they had seen ghosts coming to them now in the evenings in their cells, and that they clearly were just traumatized by what had happened to them and where they were finding themselves. Another group had come ashore in Aceh, Indonesia. The Acehnese had themselves been oppressed in the past, and so they really adopted this group, and they had a problem of too many civil society groups and medical groups wanting to help these mix of refugees from Myanmar and poor migrants from Bangladesh. And so they actually had medical clinics vying to provide them with service, which was a nice part of the story, but overall it was a tragedy.

 One of the things that I did as a diplomat on the edges of this conference was I had pre-existing relations with Tin Lin, this Foreign Ministry representative from Burma, from Myanmar, and with the Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh, and they wouldn’t talk to each other about a boat that had a mix of Bangladesh and Burmese people on it, but they both would talk to me. So I ended up fielding calls between these two countries’ reps and hammering out an agreement on how some of these folks could be returned and screened to determine where they really belonged. And some did go back to Burma, and were taken back by the Burmese, and some went back to Bangladesh.

 Deborah McCarthy: [32:23] Well, Tony, I wanted to jump in here and ask you: what role did PACOM play with these countries to encourage them to pick these people up?

 Anthony Crutchfield: [32:32] Funny listening now, Anne, to you describe something that was happening, that I was involved in from a military angle. Because I absolutely remember what you’re talking about. Here’s why: I remember sitting on our joint operations center forward directing operations where we had our navy doing maritime operations when this was happening, and by international laws we are obligated to help people in distress as a military. But as a country that is trying to wrestle through these issues, if we were to do that, and they reached a US ship—they came aboard a US ship—guess what? The United States is now responsible. So it was a very, very delicate situation. I recall the capabilities that we used were our ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconaissance], our surveillance of the area, and showing where these people were so we could keep an eye on them so that nothing too terrible could happen to them, and passing that information on to the Thai government, so the Thai government would then use their capabilities to pick them up. So it was kind of an indirect or one-off type thing. And I remember just how terrible a feeling it was, watching. I could see it from our PACOM headquarters; I could see them, because it’s uplinked to the satellites. I could see what was happening hundreds and hundreds of miles away. It is something that I will never forget. And to know the part of the story that you told, which at the time I had no idea knowing how bad that must have been, when I look back again I think, “Gosh, I wish we could have done more to help these people.”

 Anne Richard: [34:09] I think what had happened was that the smuggling and trafficking had been taking place constantly, and it wasn’t until the Thais decided to crack down on the pirates running these ships that the problem emerged. They were doing the right thing, cracking down on them, but then the people were just abandoned at sea.

 Anthony Crutchfield: [34:28] Right. There was another example of why military-to-military is so important in our country, is because we used that relationship then to try to get the Thai government to help in this situation. And so, that’s how we use our military, to help in the situation that Anne just described.

 Deborah McCarthy: [34:46] Well, I wanted to jump now to the broader picture of the global crisis of forcibly displaced people. What are roughly the numbers, the global numbers of displaced people, before we get into who’s displaced versus who’s a refugee.

 Anne Richard: [35:00] UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, keeps tabs every June, on World Refugee Day, June 20, they announce the latest numbers. So, last June they announced that there were almost 80 million forcibly displaced people around the world. Now of those, 26 million are considered refugees, meaning that they have crossed an international border and left their home country. The larger number are over 45 million people who are internally displaced persons. They are displaced in their own home countries. So, if you look at a situation like Syria, some Syrians have fled bombings in their country and gone to another part of Syria—they’re IDPs. Some have fled to neighboring countries like Jordan or Turkey or further afield (Iraq, Egypt)—they are refugees. We also have people who are asylum seekers, meaning that they have taken it on themselves to travel to try to get to another country and to ask to be given sanctuary there, and that we see on the American Southwest border. You have people coming from Central America; some are economic migrants, but right now we have quite a few people who are seeking asylum, safety, in the United States. So, there are 4.2 million asylum seekers worldwide. There are also a lot of displaced Venezuelans who are sort of a mix of these conditions in Latin America. So, all together, 80 million people who are fleeing very sad situations looking for safer places to live.

Deborah McCarthy: [36:36] So, I would assume the Rohingya, to get back to Burma, would be both internally displaced people and some are refugees.

Anne Richard: [36:45] Some of the Rohingya, you know, a fraction of the Rohingya are left inside Myanmar now, have been internally displaced if they fled or were pushed into these ghettos. Most Rohingya now are refugees, and most live in Bangladesh, although others live in the broader region.

 Deborah McCarthy: [37:04] And Tony, our military, globally, has played a role in refugee crises. Our navy rescued many Vietnamese boat people after our war in Vietnam. What is the SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] with regards to refugees?

 Anthony Crutchfield: [37:17] Most combatant commands, if not all the combatant commands, have operational type orders on the shelves for things like this, and it would be in terms of helping during crisis. And that crisis could be something like we’ve just discussed, or that crisis could be, for example, at PACOM in Bangladesh, we helped many times during the typhoons or earthquakes. Same thing in the Philippines. So that’s how they shape that in terms of the crisis. However, it is a very systematic thing to engage our military in these types of operations. It’s not something that a military commander can just do on their own. It is a diplomatic piece to this. There is an operational, military piece to this. There’s several things that have to be taken into consideration.

 When we pull a ship, for example, off of military operation—which in most cases has to be done—it’s doing something else, and it has to be diverted. There’s a process to it. It’s not something that just happens like you flip a switch. It’s a complicated situation. And in most cases, we don’t get forewarnings for some of these things, right? We don’t necessarily know exactly when a typhoon or what the impact of that typhoon is going to be until nearly when it’s happening or after. So, it is incredibly complex to use our military in these types of operations, although it’s very important that we exercise this part of US power to help people around the world.

Anne Richard: [38:49] What I’ve seen in my career is that most humanitarian operations do not involve the military. They involve a mix of US and other government donations and money and resources going to help UN agencies and non-governmental organizations. And, of course, the governments of the countries that are affected themselves where there is a functioning government, there are rules about when the military should be involved in a disaster response. One of the things is that when it’s a natural disaster, nobody can beat the US military in terms of speed and lift capacity to get a lot of people or resources or goods to a long distance really fast. As my colleague Jim Shearer who was at the Pentagon working on these issues once told me, “This is not your low-cost option to respond to disasters.” Most disasters, these private and civilian measures will be the first line of response. In fact, local people are usually the first line of response.

Where humanitarian agencies really frown on military involvement in aid operations is in conflict situations. And there’s a concern that there not be confusion about who is an aid worker and who is a soldier. The rules apply to aid workers, too. They’re not supposed to wear fatigues. They’re not supposed to dress in camouflage pants or jackets or hats. They’re not supposed to accept rides from the military. It’s in those situations, either in the midst of conflict or on the edges of conflict zones, where the roles really have to be very clear and separated.

 Anthony Crutchfield: [40:48] Of the humanitarian crises that I’ve been personally involved in in my career, number one: the military is not the lead. The US military is not the lead agency. And number two: the US military is called upon and used when there is a capability that a non-governmental agency or a government does not have. And the third thing I will say is, out of all the things I’ve ever done in my military career, helping other people in those kind of crises, is probably some of the most rewarding and memorable things of my career. And most, I would venture to say just about all, people who serve in our military, they want to do those type of operations, because they feel the value, they feel like they’re helping, and it’s for a noble cause. It’s for a good thing.

 Deborah McCarthy: [41:35] I want to turn now to a discussion of US policies for resettling refugees, and how it has applied to the Rohingya. Each year the US sets a ceiling on the number of refugees it will accept. On average, it is about 95,000. The ceiling was increased in the last couple of years of the Obama administration, especially due to the crisis in Syria. President Trump slashed the number every year, reaching an historical low of 18,000 and proposing a further cut to 15,000. It takes a long time to be processed as a refugee, and the refugees mostly wait overseas until this process is concluded. So I wanted to ask you Anne, if you could give a broad brush of what our policies are and where the Rohingya fit in—though I understand that we have taken very few because other countries have taken them and they’re in other places.

 Anne Richard: [42:29] Well, the US was a leader in resettling refugees from around the world, working hand-in-hand with the UN Refugee Agency. And we took more refugees than all other countries combined during the Obama administration. And President Obama set a goal of 85,000 for his last full year in office. And we accomplished that. Over the ten-year period, 2010-2020, the US took 125,000 Burmese, and they were for years one of the top three countries we were taking refugees from, but they weren’t the Rohingya. They were Burmese minorities who had fled into Thailand and were living in Thai camps.

 The Obama administration was followed by the Trump administration that had a very specific policy to reduce the number of refugees coming to the US. And this was President Trump but also Stephen Miller, his advisor in the White House. And what this did was it put an end to what had been a bipartisan policy of Republicans and Democrats that supported refugee resettlement in America. So, during the Trump administration the numbers were slashed and slashed and slashed again. Where people could come from, you’ve heard of the infamous Muslim ban or travel ban that was introduced a week into the Trump administration. So, we weren’t bringing Syrian refugees, and we weren’t bringing people from a lot of Muslim countries.

 In 2015 we brought about 4,000 Rohingya; in 2016, 3,000. But, in 2019, after all these cuts to the numbers coming, it was only 600 Rohingya made it to the United States. And they weren’t coming from Bangladesh. Bangladesh wants to see the refugees sent back to Burma. They are not engaged in resettling them in other countries. What happens is the Rohingya will travel on, as we’ve talked about. They will smuggle themselves or find a way to get to other countries, and from there they will sometimes seek to be resettled as refugees. I’ve met Rohingya who ended up getting detained by the Australians at sea, put into harsh conditions on two South Pacific Islands (Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea), and under an agreement that we negotiated during the Obama administration, some of them are Rohingya and some of them have come to the United States.

 So, you can meet Rohingya in the United States.  Many of them have very sad stories to tell because they still have family who are in such peril, either inside Myanmar or, more likely, in camps, and they worry greatly about their relatives.

 Deborah McCarthy: [45:02] Well, Anne, you wrote about being arrested in 2019 as you and other civil society and religious leaders protested in front of the Capitol, as then-Secretary of State Pompeo was about to testify to propose cuts in the ceiling of refugees. Given these cuts, do we have a set-up to process an increased number under the Biden administration?

 Anne Richard: [45:27] When President Biden was running for office, he put out this bold, ambitious number of 125,000 refugees per year should come to the United States. And then, upon taking office, you know, I think there was a realization, “maybe start with half that number.” Because it’s going to take a while to get to 62,500—but it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be really difficult to do, because it takes (as you said) months to have refugees interviewed, to make sure that they’re not liars, they’re not criminals, and they’re not terrorists. That’s the fear that some have, that a terrorist would sneak into the country this way. So, there’s an extensive vetting process to keep out any evildoers from the refugee resettlement project. But what’s clear to me is that the current Secretary of State and the President are very intent in this administration on building back up that program.

 Part of what’s going to be needed for the Rohingya is some kind of an understanding about some kind of diplomatic discussions about can they go home again, can they go home again safely? Is there a subset of the group that should be resettled in the US and other countries? You certainly don’t want to say we’ll resettle everyone, because if you do that then essentially the bad guys inside Burma have won. They have attacked these innocent people, and they have driven them out of the country. In terms of fairness they’d be allowed to go home again, but there’s a real question about whether they would be safe if they went home again.

 Deborah McCarthy: [46:55] I want to talk going forward a little bit about the tools that we can use. Since the coup of February 2021, the Biden administration has imposed economic sanctions and travel restrictions against the coup leaders and their families, strengthened export controls, restricted the military’s ability to transfer central bank assets held in the United States, and suspended all trade-related diplomatic engagement. We’ve also worked internationally to pressure the Burmese military. Tony, you know the Burmese military. What would drive them to respond to this external pressure?

 Anthony Crutchfield: [47:34] This is a difficult position to be in, because as I stated earlier, you don’t want to reward bad behavior, but sometimes the reward is what could get you to better behavior. It’s a delicate situation to be in. Bringing Burmese military to US military schools—I think that might be a bridge too far right now, I don’t think that’s the right approach. But I do believe the engagement between the two militaries is important, and I think that engagement should be—sort of what we were trying to do, Anne, when we would go there. First, we would send senior military people there, and then, one step further from that, I think, is we ought to let those senior military people visit the United States. Not to attend military schools, but a visit to continue the dialogue in the United States. And it can be one thing that I thought we should have done then, is have them come to Hawai’i, to PACOM, and continue the dialogue, which is something that I never could get done. It’s kind of an intermediate step, before a full-on, high level type thing. That’s something I would recommend that we do now, because (as I mentioned earlier) sometimes the military-to-military engagement is the only diplomatic means you might have to get across the message the entire government needs to get across.

 Anne Richard: [48:58] In the human rights community, I think that there’s a lot of disappointment, that Aung San Suu Kyi, who for so many years was seen as a human rights leader, a democracy icon, did not prove to be the single answer to lead Burma to democracy. That she, the daughter of a military hero, had to deal with the military really being in the driver’s seat and really retaining a great deal of power. And she was part of trying to sue for peace inside Burma with most of the minorities, but even she did not see the Rohingya as an issue that she wanted to champion. She spoke about this in the International Court of Justice case that was brought by the Gambia against Burma. She argued for leaving Burma alone and letting them carry out their own domestic investigation, and argued against international involvement, and argued against calling it a genocide. So that’s, I think for a lot of people who care about Burma, that’s a disappointment.

 You know, I guess where we have to see some hope is in these young people taking to the streets, and really demanding that they not live in a military-run regime. That they have more freedoms, and that they keep the freedoms that they have enjoyed in the last years. Those folks are the ones we have to be helping to the extent we can, from the outside.

 Deborah McCarthy: [50:30] Thank you to both of you for sharing your knowledge of an important country whose people are going through a difficult time right now, and explaining to our listeners the tools that the US does use to advance our values and our interests. Thank you for taking the time, for joining The General and the Ambassador.

 Anne Richard: [50:51] Thank you.

 Deborah McCarthy: [50:52] This has been a new episode in the series The General and the Ambassador. Thank you for listening. The series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy, in partnership with UNC Global at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find our podcast on all major sites, and on our own website: www.generalambassadorpodcast.org. Do follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We welcome all input and suggestions. You can mail us directly at general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.