Aung San Suu Kyi has finally laid her cards on the table. No more bewilderment about why the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize (a worthless honorific most often awarded war criminals), the democracy icon known as “the Mandela of Asia,” the holder of dozens of international honorifics as a champion of human rights has remained dead silent on the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Media reports the conflict as primarily a religious one between Muslims & Buddhists but Rohingya have been subject for decades to violent state-sponsored persecution & discrimination conducted by the military, including denial of citizenship (though they have lived in the region for decades), religious persecution, forced labor, land confiscations, arbitrary taxation & various forms of extortion, forced eviction & house destruction, restrictions on travel for health & work, restrictions on marriage, education, & trade. The violence is so extreme & sustained going back decades that hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas flee for asylum to Malaysia & to squalid refugee camps in Thailand & Bangladesh. Myanmar now has forced nearly 150,000 to live in concentration camps.
For years, Suu Kyi dummied up when reporters asked her about the genocide or answered in platitudes urging people to get along with each other or evasions calling for rule of law. Her evasions were taken as diplomacy even though it’s really hard to be a champion of human rights if diplomacy is your schtick. Usually daring & fearlessness are essential qualities of such champions, not cowardice or talking with marbles in your mouth. (Courtesy of Just International)
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