Aung San Suu Kyi is making wartime rape easier to commit
Former human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi is leading the
Myanmar government’s campaign to make sure that nothing is done to protect
women from sexual assault by the military in Rakhine State.
Two of her cabinet portfolios – the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs and the State Counsellor’s Office – have been more vocal than any other
government offices in denying allegations of rape of Rohingya women at the
hands of government security forces.
On Friday, the Myanmar State Counsellor’s Office publicly
accused Rohingya women of fabricating stories of rape by government security
forces, calling the phenomenon “fake rape”.
On December 13, the same office tried to debunk the
Guardian’s profile of a Rohingya rape victim on the basis that people from the
same village had “only heard of such cases in the form of rumors”.
On Saturday, the Information Committee appointed by the State
Counsellor’s Office once again denied rape allegations on the basis of
villagers saying they had not heard of any rape incidents, even after two
Rohingya women told reporters on December 21 that they had been raped by
security forces.
Though numerous reports of rape perpetrated by Tatmadaw
soldiers against Rohingya women since October 9 have been corroborated by
interviews with victims and witnesses in Bangladesh and in Rakhine State, the
military continues to block formal investigations, allowing government
spokespeople to control the narrative.
Aye Aye Soe, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, told IRIN: “Most of them are made-up stories, blown out of proportion.
The things they are accusing us of didn’t happen at all.”
Beyond her own offices, the Ministry of Information, whose
minister was hand-picked by Suu Kyi, published a piece of ‘analysis’ on
November 3 claiming that “accusations of international media of violations of
human rights of local residents during Maungtaw area clearance operations were
intentionally fabricated in collusion with terrorist groups”.
All of this sends a message to Myanmar soldiers that there
is no consequence for rape, and it is happening on Aung San Suu Kyi’s watch.
Before she started campaigning for votes in Myanmar’s 2015
general election, Aung San Suu Kyi seemed like an ideal champion for women’s
rights. She already had a Nobel Peace Prize under her belt, and she was eager
to criticize the forces in Myanmar society that bolstered patriarchy –
including the military.
In 2011, she told Nobel Women’s Initiative: “Rape is used in
my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only
wants to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic
nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to
intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.” Video clip: https://youtu.be/SOHEosj-M5U
But the person who said those words is gone. Or, just as
likely, she never existed at all.
Suu Kyi’s opposition to rape softened almost as soon as she
had something to lose. In December 2014, after she was elected to parliament
and less than a year before the NLD would be swept into power, she was asked if
she was concerned about the impunity the Myanmar military enjoys after using
rape as a weapon of war, which had been documented in a report by the Women’s
League of Burma a few weeks earlier.
Instead of reiterating the well-documented truths in her
2011 statement, she defended the Tatmadaw by saying the ethnic armed groups’
rape, too.
“This has to do with rule of law. And that has to do with
politics, and the position of the army as it is in a particular political structure.
I think you are well aware of the fact that military armed groups which are not
official armies also engage in sexual violence in conditions of conflict,” she
said at a press conference in Yangon.
By not calling for rape allegations to be investigated and
refusing to condemn wartime rape, which once she said herself is “rife” in the
country, Aung San Suu Kyi is making rape easier to commit and easier to get
away with.
Some political calculus in Suu Kyi’s mind led her to
denounce rape committed by the military in 2011, to distract us from it in 2014
and then to all but guarantee impunity for it in 2016. Her political pragmatism
endangers the lives of women and their families and stunts development in
Myanmar.
“Every case of rape divides our country between…the armed
forces and ordinary citizens,” Suu Kyi told the Nobel Women’s Initiative in
2011.
Today, we know what side of that divide Aung San Suu Kyi is
on.