The Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh is the world’s largest refugee camp, with a population of almost one million Rohingya families (World Food Program 2020). The Rohingyas, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority group in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, are escaping historical prosecution and human rights abuses, both in law and practice (MSF 2017a, b). Despite travel restrictions on humanitarian agencies by the Myanmar government, the Rohingya refugee crisis gained significant global attention through graphic images, videos, and stories from the Rakhine State (Neuman 2018; Islam 2018). Furthermore, investigative reports published by reputable news outlets galvanized international attention to what the United Nations (U.N.) has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” (OHCHR 2017; Mahmood et al. 2017; Vu and Lynn 2020). For humanitarians, however, the question of whether international media coverage helps with foreign policy and initiates humanitarian interventions to stop the refugee influx remains unclear and complicated.
Although there is no one standard or legal definition of humanitarian intervention, the Responsibility to Protect has been adopted since 2005 by the U.N., which states it would take timely and decisive action when national authorities of other countries manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (United Nations 2005). There are four main different types of U.N. intervention action—assurance, diplomatic engagement, military involvement, and intimidation (Beardsley 2012), including humanitarian aid and international sanctions. Existing human rights literature shows that shaming tactics by human rights advocacy groups promote third-party actions against repressive regimes, such as reduced foreign direct investment (Barry et al. 2012), trade and economic sanctions (Peksen et al. 2014), and humanitarian armed interventions (Murdie and Peksen 2014).
The role of the foreign media and humanitarian interventions has been the subject of significant academic research, regarding the effects of news media on foreign governments’ political decisions to intervene, known as the ‘CNN effect’ (Robinson 2000; Balabanova 2010). The ‘CNN effect’ describes the policy-media interaction and predicts that media influence occurs when the policy is uncertain and media coverage is critically framed to empathize with suffering people, but when the policy is certain, media influence is unlikely to occur (Robinson 2000). Scholars often cite the 1992‑1995 Bosnian War (Robinson 2000) as an example of media influence on foreign policy; however, others remain skeptical, suggesting that the Bosnian example may be based on certain cultural and political assumptions, where “working with the same presumption outside of the West European context might not be very successful” (Balabanova 2010). Furthermore, recent literature on the “Amnesty international effect” has argued that human rights organizations’ activities appear to have a significant impact on the likelihood of military interventions led by third-party states (Murdie and Peksen 2014). Meanwhile, others have found that determinants of intervention decisions tend to focus on geopolitical and economic factors, often ignoring the potential non-state actors, such as media and humanitarian organizations, to influence foreign policy decisions on humanitarian intervention (Beardsley and Schmidt 2011; Choi 2013). In summary, scholarly and professional studies of the CNN effect that media has a direct effect in relieving humanitarian crises present mixed, contradictory, and confusing results (Gilboa 2005). Thus, for humanitarians, a question still exists on how the news media coverage trends affect the population group they report on and influence humanitarian intervention.
This study examines the effects of mass media coverage of the Rohingya refugee crisis that was driven by horrific images and narratives that served as a motivator for foreign policy action, including diplomatic humanitarian interventions and economic sanctions. In particular, this study complements the relevant literature on the possible link between global media coverage and humanitarian interventions by focusing on international diplomatic changes on the causes of the crisis to stop it. By examining news media coverage of the Rohingya crisis in two elite newspaper sources, including The New York Times and The Guardian, this study aims to compare the media coverage trends to the displacement rates of Rohingya refugees between January 1, 2010, and January 1, 2021. Establishing this timeline allows us to compare variation in the frequency of news reports to trends of forced displacement from Myanmar reported to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The questions guiding this study were (1) How did media coverage of the two newspapers on the Rohingya refugee crisis change between 2010 and 2020? (2) How do media trends correspond to the number of Rohingya refugees? (3) How do media trends correspond to key policy changes and humanitarian interventions by the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies to stop the causes of refugee influx?
International media attention is an important tool to start the process of mobilization and opinion-shaping of the international community by shining light on egregious human rights violations in remote parts of the world. This study argues that increased media attention to the Rohingya refugee crisis increases the likelihood of humanitarian intervention to reduce the number of Rohingya refugees fleeing from violence in Myanmar. As the number of media coverage increases, this would mobilize the international pressures to stop the causes of the refugee influx and potentially initiate various humanitarian interventions that aim to protect the human rights of Rohingyas in Myanmar.
To better contextualize and provide a holistic understanding of this study, the paper will first examine the historical background of the Rohingya refugee crisis. Thereafter, the paper will describe the methodological framework employed in this study to analyze the available data from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) and application programming interface (API) from The Guardian and The New York Times. This will be followed by a discussion of the findings of the study. The paper now turns to examine the historical context of the Burmese-Rohingya conflict.
The Rohingya crisis
Living in a country where almost 90% of the citizens are Buddhist, Rohingyas have been dehumanized by socio-historically constructed and imposed identity throughout the colonial and post-colonial years by the majority Buddhists (Siddiquee 2019). They are perceived as illegal and unwelcome foreigners, as people call them “Bengalis” and reject using the term “Rohingya” to deny them of their ethnic heritage (Rosenthal 2019). One of the major systematic violations against the Rohingyas is the discriminatory 1982 citizenship law, which disenfranchised the Rohingya people from equal access to full citizenship in Myanmar, leaving one in seven stateless persons in the world as Rohingya ever since (Tran 2015; Mahmood et al. 2017; MacLean 2019). Another notable example of systematic erasure is the U.N.-backed 2014 census, in which the government banned the term “Rohingya” and replaced it with “people who believe in Islam in Rakhine State,” effectively uncounting more than one million people from the national census (Ferguson 2015; Southwick 2018; MacLean 2019).
Furthermore, the Rohingyas have been systematically denied access to fundamental social services such as education, health care, reproductive health, and the internet, effectively limiting them from access to critical information and aid from international humanitarian organizations (Khin 2017; Rosenthal 2019; Bakali and Wasty 2020). Before 2017, more than 70% of the Rohingya lacked access to safe water and sanitation services, and only 2% of Rohingya women gave birth in hospitals (Khin 2017).
In addition to decades of systematic discrimination, persecution, and statelessness, the Rohingyas have faced waves of violence between 1978 and 2017 that have forcibly displaced them into Bangladesh (Baird 2020). The 2017 Rohingya refugee crisis is not an isolated event; rather, it is part of a series of major military operations targeting the Rohingyas by the state’s armed forces, the Tatmadaw (MacLean 2019). In 1978, Operation Dragon King (Nagamin) sought to take action against ‘illegal immigrants,’ forcing more than 200,000 Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh as a consequence of the violence and human rights abuses during its operations by the Tatmadaw (Khan and Munshi 1983; MacLean 2019). In 1992, another round of operations forced more than 300,000 Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh, with horrifying accounts of rape, forced labor, and religious persecution (Human Rights Watch 1993; Toole and Waldman 1997).
In October 2016, the Tatmadaw launched a major crackdown on the Rohingya, including men and boys being taken for forced labor, girls and young women raped and sexually exploited, and children disappearing (United States Department of State 2016). Notably, the Tatmadaw adopted Facebook to promote anti-Rohingya propaganda online, in which hundreds of military officials created fake names, news, and entertainment pages and then posted inflammatory posts portraying Rohingya as terrorists (Mozur 2018). Without much accountability, Facebook continues to be the platform where Tatmadow officials spread hate speech and disinformation against the Rohingya people, causing “a negative impact on freedom of expression, assembly and association for Myanmar’s most vulnerable users” (Stevenson 2018).
Triggered by a combination of intensifying violence, human rights violations, and systematic marginalization, the major exodus of Rohingya refugees began in October 2017 (Sida 2018), as more than 647,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh while 6700 were killed during the violent attacks (MSF 2017a, b). International organizations documented large-scale atrocities against civilians by the Tatmadaw including murder, torture, rape, and wanton destruction of property (Akhavan 2019), which the U.N. (OHCHR 2017) and Amnesty International (2018) described as “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” In January 2020, the International Court of Justice in The Hague unanimously ordered Myanmar to take all necessary measures to prevent the genocide of the Rohingyas in Myanmar (ICJ 2020), but little is known about the effects of the order on improving the living conditions of the Rohingyas in Myanmar.
Despite strong advocacy by the U.N. and international humanitarian agencies for unhindered humanitarian access, the Myanmar government has banned humanitarian organizations and their staff to visit the Rakhine State, restricting the U.N. from verifying reports of ongoing human rights violations and the number of people still internally displaced or fleeing (OCHA 2017). This “information blackout” raises urgent humanitarian needs of Rohingya still in Myanmar and 128,000 people who are still confined in camps for internally displaced people (OCHA 2017). About 78% of them are women and children, who live in “overcrowded shelters and inadequate access to services and living opportunities” and their well-being continues to remain unknown and invisible to international observers (OCHA 2017; MacLean 2019).
The scale and speed of displacement were unprecedented in both Bangladesh and the wider region, creating significant humanitarian needs and impacting host communities (UNDP 2018). Although surrounding countries, such as Bangladesh, and international organizations have been compassionately aiding to alleviate the consequences of the Rohingya refugee crisis, humanitarian intervention policies should aim to act on the causes of the crisis to stop it, as it is not sustainable for other countries to continue hosting fleeing Rohingyas. Throughout the refugee camps in Bangladesh, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the living conditions, made access to services even more challenging, increased the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, and exacerbated the impacts of infectious diseases in crowded camps (UNHCR 2020). Lack of access to critical and life-saving services, such as food, drinkable water, latrines, and limited access to health services are turning an already serious crisis into a major human disaster (Banik and Rahman 2020). In summary, forced displacement, segregation, and severe restrictions on freedom of movement and press all contribute to “creeping apartheid,” a form of ethnic cleansing in slow motion, that makes it “easier to carry out large sale clearance operations” (MacLean 2019).
Having discussed the conditions that created the Rohingya refugee crisis, the paper now turns to describe the methodological frameworks and processes employed in this study to examine media influence on international humanitarian aid to the Rohingya refugee crisis.