Global Dispatches -- Conversations On Foreign Policy And World Affairs

In August 2017, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya muslims from Myanmar fled across the border to Bangladesh. The Rohingya are a minority population that have long faced discrimination by the Buddhist Burmese majority. In the summer of 2017, things got very bad, very quickly.  A Rohingya militant group attacked some police outposts in Myanmar. The government and military responded by attacking Rohingya towns and villages, unleashing massive violence against a civilian population. This drove over 600,000 Rohingya to refugee camps in a region of Bangladesh known as Cox's Bazar. Some 700,000 Rohingya refugees remain there, to this day.  The violence that drove these people from their home was certainly a crime against humanity -- a UN official called it "a text book example of an ethnic cleansing."  And maybe even a genocide.  That of course demands the question: who will pay for these crimes. What does accountability look like in a situation like this. And can perpetrators of these crimes even be brought