How the United Nations Denied and Enabled Myanmar’s Genocide of the Rohingya

Based on direct observation and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2014–15, this Chapter examines the United Nations’ (UN) role in denial and cover-up of the genocide against the Rohingya people. The UN’s engagement amounted to ‘state-humanitarian crime’—human rights abuses resulting from mutually reinforcing interactions between a criminal state and a humanitarian actor. Drawing on our fieldwork, the chapter documents how the UN systematically failed to identify, prevent, or challenge the genocide. It analyses the UN’s operational complicity on the ground, including its maintenance of apartheid structures, institutionalisation of denial, suppression of its own human rights officers, facilitation of the 2014 census that sought to erase Rohingya identity, and promotion of unsafe repatriations. The chapter concludes that the UN’s prioritisation of stable state relations and development goals over human rights protection enabled the Myanmar regime to pursue its genocidal project, aimed at the complete and irreversible erasure of the Rohingya people from Myanmar, with impunity.