The shameful silence of Aung San Suu Kyi
Want
smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday
along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today's WorldView newsletter.
There's a population of around a million people living in fear right now, facing the likely wrath of an uncaring government that doesn't seem to recognize their claim to the country they have always called home. The crisis along the Burma-Bangladesh border has dramatically intensified over the past week, with more than 125,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing a Burmese military offensive in restive Rakhine state, according to aid organizations. Reports keep flooding in of mass killings carried out by Burmese security forces, as well as torture, rape and the systematic razing of Rohingya villages.
Burmese authorities say they are carrying out “clearance operations” against extremist “Bengali” insurgents — “Bengali” being a term the government uses to suggest Rohingyas are foreign interlopers rather than native Burmese. A growing chorus of Muslim leaders around the world has condemned Burma's actions, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dubbed a “genocide.”
Protesters hold signs against Suu Kyi during a rally in support of the Rohingya in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sept. 4, 2017. (Darren Whiteside/Reuters)
In the eye of the storm is Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's long-celebrated Nobel
peace laureate who is the nation's de facto civilian leader (she is
formally barred from the presidency because members of her family are
foreign citizens). For more than two decades, Suu Kyi occupied a
hallowed place in the global imagination as a political prisoner,
champion of democracy and relentless opponent of the brutal military
junta that long dominated Burmese politics. She was, in essence, Asia's
Nelson Mandela, a picture of grace and moral authority.
Your correspondent remembers attending a lavish New York gala in her honor in 2012 during which she was feted by Henry Kissinger and other American luminaries. Kissinger hailed her at the time as an exemplar of how “societies become great when they turn confrontation into reconciliation.”
But when it comes to the Rohingya, Suu Kyi has shown little interest in “reconciliation.” Burma's population is a fractious, multi-religious patchwork of dozens of ethnic groups, but no community has been more neglected than the Rohingya, whom the junta stripped of their citizenship rights in 1982. They have lived in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine ever since, and observers see the growing insurgency there more as the symptom of decades of government abuse and persecution than the flourishing of foreign Islamist militant networks on Burmese soil.
Rights groups have warned of the vulnerability of the Rohingya for quite some time. In 2015, the U.S. Holocaust Museum even ranked Burma as the country most at risk of a campaign of genocide.
“The de facto leader needs to step in — that is what we would expect from any government, to protect everybody within their own jurisdiction,” said Yanghee Lee, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, who suggested that more than a thousand Rohingya have been killed over the past week.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/06/the-shameful-silence-of-aung-san-suu-kyi/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.af2c0778b71c
There's a population of around a million people living in fear right now, facing the likely wrath of an uncaring government that doesn't seem to recognize their claim to the country they have always called home. The crisis along the Burma-Bangladesh border has dramatically intensified over the past week, with more than 125,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing a Burmese military offensive in restive Rakhine state, according to aid organizations. Reports keep flooding in of mass killings carried out by Burmese security forces, as well as torture, rape and the systematic razing of Rohingya villages.
Burmese authorities say they are carrying out “clearance operations” against extremist “Bengali” insurgents — “Bengali” being a term the government uses to suggest Rohingyas are foreign interlopers rather than native Burmese. A growing chorus of Muslim leaders around the world has condemned Burma's actions, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dubbed a “genocide.”
Protesters hold signs against Suu Kyi during a rally in support of the Rohingya in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Sept. 4, 2017. (Darren Whiteside/Reuters)
Your correspondent remembers attending a lavish New York gala in her honor in 2012 during which she was feted by Henry Kissinger and other American luminaries. Kissinger hailed her at the time as an exemplar of how “societies become great when they turn confrontation into reconciliation.”
But when it comes to the Rohingya, Suu Kyi has shown little interest in “reconciliation.” Burma's population is a fractious, multi-religious patchwork of dozens of ethnic groups, but no community has been more neglected than the Rohingya, whom the junta stripped of their citizenship rights in 1982. They have lived in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine ever since, and observers see the growing insurgency there more as the symptom of decades of government abuse and persecution than the flourishing of foreign Islamist militant networks on Burmese soil.
Rights groups have warned of the vulnerability of the Rohingya for quite some time. In 2015, the U.S. Holocaust Museum even ranked Burma as the country most at risk of a campaign of genocide.
“The de facto leader needs to step in — that is what we would expect from any government, to protect everybody within their own jurisdiction,” said Yanghee Lee, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, who suggested that more than a thousand Rohingya have been killed over the past week.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/09/06/the-shameful-silence-of-aung-san-suu-kyi/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.af2c0778b71c
Comments
Post a Comment