AUNG SAN SUU KYI IS ONE of the most
celebrated human rights icons of our age: Nobel Peace Laureate, winner of the
Sakharov Prize, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an Amnesty
International-recognized prisoner of conscience for 15 long years.
These days, however, she is also an
apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape.
For the past year, Aung San Suu
Kyi has been State Counselor, or de facto head of government, in
Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the northern Rakhine
state have been shot, stabbed, starved, robbed, raped and driven from their
homes in
the hundreds of thousands. In December, while the world focused on the fall
of Aleppo, more than a dozen Nobel Laureates published an open
letter warning of a tragedy in Rakhine “amounting to ethnic cleansing and
crimes against humanity.”
In February, a report by the United Nations documented how the
Burmese army’s attacks on the Rohingya were “widespread as well as systematic”
thus “indicating the very likely commission of crimes against humanity.” More
than half of the 101 Rohingya women interviewed by UN investigators across the
border in Bangladesh said they had suffered rape or other forms of sexual
violence at the hands of security forces. “They beat and killed my husband with
a knife,” one survivor recalled. “Five of them took off my clothes and raped
me. My eight-month old son was crying of hunger when they were in my house
because he wanted to breastfeed, so to silence him they killed him too with a
knife.”
And the response of Aung San
Suu Kyi? This once-proud
campaigner against wartime rape and human rights abuses by the Burmese
military has opted to borrow from the Donald Trump playbook of denial and
deflection. Her office accused Rohingya women of fabricating stories of sexual
violence and put the words “fake rape” — in the
form of a banner headline, no less — on its official website. A spokesperson
for the Foreign Ministry — also controlled directly by Aung San Suu Kyi — dismissed
“made-up stories, blown out of proportion.” In February, the State Counselor
herself reportedly
told the Archbishop of Yangon, Charles Bo, that the international community is
exaggerating the Rohingya issue.
This is Trumpism 101: Deny.
Discredit. Smear.
A Rohingya boy from Myanmar is
photographed during police identification procedures at a newly set up
confinement area in Bayeun, Aceh province on May 21, 2015, after more than 400
Rohingya migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh were rescued by Indonesian
fishermen off the waters of the province.
Photo: Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty
Images
It was all supposed to be so
different. In November 2015, Myanmar held its first contested national
elections after five decades of military rule. An overwhelming victory for
Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD)
and former political prisoner, was going to usher in a new era of democracy,
human rights and respect for minorities. That, at least, was the hope.
The reality has been very
different. Less than a year after taking office, Burmese security forces
launched a brutal
crackdown on the Rohingya after an attack on a border outpost in Rakhine
killed nine police officers in October. The northern portion of the state was
sealed off by the military and humanitarian aid was blocked, as was access to
foreign journalists and human rights groups. Hundreds of Rohingya Muslims are
believed to have been slaughtered
and tens of thousands driven across the border into Bangladesh.
This is only the latest chapter in the anti-Rohingya saga. The
Muslim residents of Rakhine have been subjected to violent attacks by the military since 2012 and
were stripped of citizenship, and rendered stateless,
as long ago as 1982. The 1-million odd Rohingya Muslims live in apartheid-like
conditions: denied access to employment, education and healthcare, forced to obtain permission to marry and subjected to a
discriminatory “two-child” policy. “About 10 percent are held in
internment camps,” according to Patrick Winn, Asia correspondent for Public Radio
International. “The rest are quarantined in militarized districts and forbidden
to travel.”
The standard Western media
narrative is to accuse The Lady, as she is known by her admirers, of silence
and of a grotesque failure to speak out against these human rights abuses. In
an editorial last May, the New
York Times denounced Suu Kyi’s “cowardly stance on the Rohingya.”
Yet hers is not merely a crime
of omission, a refusal to denounce or condemn. Hers are much worse crimes of commission.
She took a deliberate
decision to try and discredit the Rohingya victims of rape. She went out of
her way to accuse
human rights groups and foreign journalists of exaggerations and fabrications.
She demanded
that the U.S. government stop using the name “Rohingya” — thereby perpetuating
the pernicious myth that the Muslims of Rakhine are “Bengali” interlopers
(rather than a Burmese community with a centuries-long presence inside
Myanmar.) She also appointed a former army general to investigate the recent
attacks on the Rohingya and he produced a report in January that, not
surprisingly, whitewashed
the well-documented crimes of his former colleagues in the Burmese military.
Silence, therefore, is the
least of her sins. Silence also suggests a studied neutrality. Yet there is
nothing neutral about Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance. She has picked her side and it
is the side of Buddhist nationalism and crude Islamophobia.
In 2013, after an interview
with the BBC’s Mishal Husain, Aung San Suu Kyi complained,
“No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim.” In 2015, ahead of
historic parliamentary elections, the NLD leader purged
her party of all Muslim candidates, resulting in the country’s first
legislature without any Muslim representation whatsoever. Like a Burmese Steve
Bannon, she paranoiacally speaks
of “global Muslim power” being “very great” — only 4 percent of the Burmese
population, incidentally, is Muslim — while conspiratorially dismissing reports of
Buddhist-orchestrated massacres in Rakhine as “Muslims killing Muslims.”
This is a form of genocide
denial, delivered in a soft tone and posh voice by a telegenic Nobel Peace
Prize winner. Genocide, though, sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it?
Pro-Rohingya propaganda, perhaps? Yet independent study after independent study
has come to the same stark and depressing conclusion: genocide is being
carried out against the Rohingya. For example, an October 2015 legal analysis
by the Allard
K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, found
“strong evidence… that genocidal acts have been committed against Rohingya” and
“that such acts have been committed with the intent to destroy the Rohingya, in
whole or in part.”
Rohingya from Myanmar who
recently crossed over to Bangladesh huddle in a room at an unregistered refugee
camp in Teknaf, near Cox’s Bazar, south of Dhaka, Bangladesh on Dec. 2, 2016.
Photo: A.M. Ahad/AP
Another report published in the
same month, by the International
State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London, concluded that
“the Rohingya face the final stages of genocide” and noted how “state-sponsored
stigmatisation, discrimination, violence and segregation … make precarious the
very existence of the Rohingya.”
Aung San Suu Kyi, argues Maung
Zarni, a Burmese scholar and founder of the Free Burma Coalition, holds
“genocidal views towards the Rohingya” because “she denies Rohingya identity
and history.” Genocide, he tells me, “begins with an attack on identity and
history. The victims never existed and … will never exist.”
The State Counselor, from this
perspective, is not simply standing by as genocide occurs; she is legitimizing,
encouraging and enabling it. When a legendary champion of human rights is in
charge of a government that undertakes military operations against
“terrorists,” smearing and discrediting the victims of gang rape and loudly
denying the burning
down of villages and forced
expulsion of families, it makes it much harder for the international
community to highlight those crimes, let alone intervene to halt them. In
recent years, in fact, Western governments have been rolling back political and
economic sanctions on Myanmar, citing the country’s “progress“on
democracy and pointing to the election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD.
Politicians and pundits in the West,
observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as “their liberal darling — petite,
attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman with the most prestigious
pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don, connected with the British
Establishment.” Belatedly, the West’s journalists, diplomats and human
rights groups “are waking up to the ugly realities that she is neither
principled nor liberal,” he adds.
It may be too little and too
late, however. Around 1,000 Rohinga are believed
to have been killed since October and more than 70,000 have been forced to flee
the country. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi continues to shamelessly tell interviewers,
such as the BBC’s Fergal
Keane last week, that there is no ethnic cleansing going on and that the
Burmese military are “not free to rape, pillage and torture” in Rakhine. Is
this the behavior of a Mandela… or a Mugabe?
“Saints should always be judged
guilty,” wrote George Orwell, in his famous 1949 essay
on Mahatma Gandhi, “until they are proved innocent.” There is no evidence of
innocence when it comes to Aung San Suu Kyi and her treatment of the Rohingya —
only complicity and collusion in unspeakable crimes. This supposed saint is now
an open sinner. The former political prisoner and democracy activist has turned
into a genocide-denying, rape-excusing, Muslim-bashing Buddhist nationalist.
Forget the house arrest and the Nobel Prize. This is how history will remember
The Lady of Myanmar.
Top photo: Aung San Suu Kyi
arrives at the polling station to cast vote during Myanmar’s first free and
fair election on Nov. 8, 2015 in Yangon, Myanmar.
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