Medieval historians in the Middle East often used the memory of particularly great disasters as a label for a year or even a whole epoch under study. The original model came from pre-Islamic Arabia with such well known examples as "The Year of the Elephant" remembering the year in which the Abyssinians invaded the Tihama, or the Year of the Locust in which swarms of famished insects wiped out crops across a vast arc spanning from the Peninsula to the Mediterranean.
Last year we used the formula by designating 2016 as The Year of Aleppo to mark the destruction through carpet-bombing of a great Islamic city by the Russian Air Force, pushing the Syrian tragedy further down the abyss of inhumanity.
At the time we couldn't imagine that 2017 will witness an even greater crime against humanity in the shape of what the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has dubbed "the genocide" of the Rohingya people in Burma (Myanmar).
Aleppo was crucified by a foreign power using its superior military force against a defenseless population pushed to the edge of collective nervous breakdown by years of starvation and conflict.
In the case of the Rohingya, however, the genocide was organized and carried out by what was, in theory at least, the victims' own central government and "national" army. Worse still the government in question was, again in theory at least, headed by a woman who had been cast as an angel of compassion and crowned with a Nobel Prize for Peace.
That Russia might use massive force to crush real or imagined foes would cause little surprise for those familiar with history. It was not so long ago that the Russian air force reduced Chechnya to a pile of rubble, killed a quarter of the population and drove another quarter out of their homes.
Burma, however, was supposed to be a peaceful neck of the wood where Buddhism, supposed to be a school of peace and harmony reigned supreme.
In 1977, I interviewed the Burmese "strongman" General Ne Win who harped at length about how Buddha's teachings could save the world from violence and war.
The fact that he himself had seized power through a putsch seemed an exception against a broader history in which Burma, an ex-British colony, appeared to be immune from the kind of violence the world had witnessed in the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent and neighboring Indo-China.
To students of post-colonial developments, Burma had the potential to become a model of peaceful development.
Under Prime Minister Thakin Nu, better known as U Nu, Burma had achieved a special status in the non-aligned movement. U Nu himself was ranked along India's Nehru and Indonesia Sukarno as the three "sages" of the so-called Third World. Thus, when U Nu proposed one of his ministers, U Thant, as Secretary General of the United Nations, everyone applauded. In the chilliest years of the Cold War U Thant managed to lead the UN for 10 years, a record at his time.
I interviewed U Thant in Tehran in 1968, when he chaired an international conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His aim was to broaden the scope of the original declaration to include a whole set of new social and economic rights.
The result was the famous Tehran Declaration, a fruit of U Thant's patient diplomacy and goodwill, which remains the pinnacle of "progressive" aspirations.
So, how could the country of U Nu and U Thant, a land which has the highest ratio of priests to the total population, become the venue for the largest genocide the world has seen since Rwanda in the last century? Worse still, how could the Buddhist clergy become cheer-leaders and, in many cases, even active accomplices of the military units specially trained to kill civilians and raze villages to the ground?
The first lesson to draw from the genocide of the Rohingya is that one should not exclude the possibility of evil in human affairs as mere figment of metaphysical imagination.
As the Persian poet Nasser Khosrow observed almost 1000 years ago, since we see the effect of evil, if we wish to combat it, we had better assume its existence. Evil could assume many identities.
It could wear the mask of a spiritual sage like U Nu or a compassionate peacemaker like U Thant not to mention the soldier of "Buddhist Socialism" Ne Win or the darling of Western bleeding-heart liberals Aung Sang Suu Ky.
To justify the genocide, Myanmar propaganda has accused the Rohingya of many misdeeds, most notably that of having fought Japanese invaders of Burma during the Second World War. They are also blamed for keeping their own language, one of 22 languages native to Burma, alive. But the Rohingya's supreme crime is that a majority of them are Muslims.
And, yet, the Rohingya have received little more than lip service from the 57 Muslim-majority nations. None has deemed it necessary to sever ties with Myanmar. A handful have sent token aid to Rohingya refugees dying of starvation and disease in neighboring Bangladesh.
 Rohingya refugees from Burma arrive in Bangladesh, on September 17, 2017. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images) |
The Islamic Republic in Iran was even less attentive to the Rohingya tragedy. A cargo of humanitarian aid, perhaps costing a few hundred thousand dollars, much less than Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's monthly stipend from Tehran, was sent to Bangladesh that hosts half a million Rohingyas forced out of Burma.
No regime big shot, and not even one of the thousands of mullahs getting fat on government salary, was sent to shed crocodile tears and wave the flag. As for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for Iran's "Supreme Guide" AIi Khamenei, it was Jerusalem or bust.
The so-called international community did no better. The UN Security Council and General Assembly could come up with emergency sessions to condemn Trump's Jerusalem move; something that has no effect on the reality on the ground, but were reluctant to put the Rohingya genocide on the agenda.
The Security Council could promulgate unanimous sanctions against North Korea's "little rocket-man" but dragged its silk-stockinged feet when it came to deciding meaningful action on the Rohingya.
Yes, 2017 was the Year of the Rohingya and a year of shame for the so-called international community.
Amir Taheri, formerly editor of Iran's premier newspaper, Kayhan, before the Iranian revolution of 1979, is a prominent author based on Europe. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
This article first appeared in Asharq Al Awsat and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
Faith Quintero