Abstract
Following the lead of the Australian government, the refusals by the Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian authorities to permit the entry by boat of several thousand Rohingya migrants travelling from Bangladesh and Myanmar in May 2015 generated a Southeast Asian ‘refugee crisis’. While the three states eventually relented, those arriving by boat continued to face indefinite detention, containment in camps or a precarious, stateless existence dependent on illicit smuggling networks. Drawing on Stanley Cohen’s work on bystanders and denial and more recent scholarship on state crime in the region, this chapter examines how the forced migration of the Rohingya has been framed predominantly as a crisis of border policing and migration controls. Further, it is argued that the focus of regional governments and global institutions on increasing private investment and economic development in Myanmar, a state also embraced by a burgeoning network of NGOs as in transition to democracy, serves both to sustain and obscure the systematic persecution and genocide of the Rohingya minority.
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- 1.
Based on a survey of 98 news items from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, SBS World News, the Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun between 1 May 2015 and 1 July 2015. My thanks to UNSW Law student Bronte Richardson for her assistance with the research for this section.
- 2.
For example, the Guardian (Stoakes et al. 2015) and the Associated Press reports at http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/associated-press
- 3.
The Sydney Daily Telegraph and the Melbourne Herald Sun.
- 4.
On the distinctions between smuggling and trafficking, see Lee (2007).
- 5.
For a summary of these criticisms, see Lee (2016).
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Grewcock, M. (2018). Bordering on Denial: State Persecution, Border Controls and the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. In: Bhatia, M., Poynting, S., Tufail, W. (eds) Media, Crime and Racism. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71776-0_9
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