In recent weeks, State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly renounced the term “Rohingya” to describe the 1.1 million inhabitants in Myanmar, instead insisting that official government policy classify them as “people who believe in Islam.”
An attempt at effectively erasing the Rohingya from national lexicon, and in certain respects rewriting history, is equivalent to a denial of their very existence. Self-determination, apparently, is not something that this Nobel Peace Prize laureate is championing any longer, at least for a select few.
The European Union, also a Nobel laureate, followed by allowing Suu Kyi a margin of appreciation, saying that the government needed the political space to address the issue and would avoid the term to refer to the persecuted minority. The United States, alternatively, has explicitly said they would continue to use the term Rohingya. While disagreement over the term persists, religious intolerance and violence continues, directly impacting the Rohingya and Muslims around the country. (Courtesy of huffingtonpost.com)
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