Genocide is a laughing matter for Aung San Suu Kyi
By Maung Zarni and Gregory
Stanton
Aung San Suu Kyi held a large
town hall meeting in Singapore December 1.
She LAUGHED OUT LOUD at allegations of massacres of Rohingya. She said
they are 'external fabrications'.
Amidst protests in Asian
capitals over ongoing atrocities against the Rohingya in Myanmar committed by
government troops, Adama Dieng, United Nations Special Adviser on the
Prevention of Genocide, issued a sternly worded alarm over the “allegations of
extrajudicial executions, torture, rape and the destruction of religious
property” in Rohingya villages. He
firmly urged the Myanmar government to “demonstrate its commitment to the rule
of law and to the human rights of all its populations.”
Human Rights Watch has
presented satellite images of over a thousand charred buildings in Rohingya
villages where government troops have carried out ‘clearance operations’ since
9 October when Rohingya militants, armed with swords and sticks and a ‘few
hand-made’ guns, attacked three Burmese border posts near the country’s border
with Bangladesh, killing nine policemen.
For nine weeks, the government
has locked down the entire northern Rakhine state, blocking the flow of
humanitarian assistance, both food and medicine, to 160,000 Rohingya. Witnesses smuggle out grainy images of
burning rice supplies in the areas of the military’s mop-up operations,
evidence that the government intends to deprive the entire Rohingya population
in the locked-down area of their food supply.
The government’s intention can only be understand as induced starvation
of the Rohingya population, an act of genocide.
Reminiscent of past genocides,
the government troops separate men of all ages from their families for torture
and murder, while raping women with blanket impunity. A woman who survived this horrendous sexual
violence phoned a relative in Malaysia, and begged, “Just wish us to die fast
death. We can’t bear this anymore. They (the Burmese troops) are killing our men
and boys. They are doing anything they
please with us, women. We don’t want to
be carrying babies of these monsters.
Please, please, send us birth control pills.”
Weeks of wanton slaughter,
arson and rape have resulted in the forced displacement of over 30,000 Rohingya
from their villages in northern Rakhine.
UNHCR has estimated that at least 10,000 Rohingya fleeing death and
destruction have gathered along the 170 mile long land and river borders with
Bangladesh. The government of Bangladesh
has tried to keep its borders shut, and forces the refugees back to the Burmese
side. A small number who have made it
across to the nearest refugee camp tell tales of horror in Rakhine, confirming
the widely reported allegations of mass atrocities.
These are just the most recent
testimonies of a well-documented, systematic program of state-organized
persecution of the Rohingya over the last four decades. Ex-General Khan Nyunt, former Head of
Military Intelligence with 25 years of intimate involvement in these violent
operations against the Rohingya, recorded that in the first large scale
campaign against the Rohingya in 1978, nearly 280,000 Rohingyas fled to
Bangladesh. When General Zia Rahman of
Bangladesh threatened to arm the Rohingyas if Burma refused to take them back,
the Ne Win government of Burma grudgingly accepted UNHCR’s managed repatriation
of the majority of those who fled.
Following this repatriation,
Burma’s military rulers enacted a new Citizenship Law in 1982, stripping the
Rohingya of all citizenship and legal rights, making Rohingyas instant aliens
on their own ancestral land. The law
excludes from citizenship any Rohingya who cannot prove their ancestors were
already in residence in Burma on the eve of the first Anglo-Burmese War of
1824. Few people have such records. This requirement is enforced only against the
Rohingya. The Citizenship Law excluded
Rohingya from the list of groups recognized as ethnic minorities in the
multi-ethnic Union of Burma.
The parallel to Nazi Germany is
exact. The Nuremberg Laws stripped German citizenship from all Jewish people in
the Third Reich.
The official estimate of the
Rohingya population is 1.33 million.
Over 800,000 of them have no legal status in Myanmar. They are effectively stateless. An estimated 60,000 Rohingya children have no
birth certificates because the Myanmar government refuses to grant each newborn
the right to a nationality, in direct violation of its obligations as a party
to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
State-sponsored violence
against the Rohingya, Karen, Kachin, Shan and other minorities in Burma from
1978 to 2012 went largely un-reported in the world’s media because the Burmese
military junta closed off Burma from the outside world. Since the commercial opening of Myanmar (as
Burma is now called) in 2012, the government of President (ex-General) Thein
Sein has framed its persecution as ‘communal or sectarian violence’ between
Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhine.
The world has come to view the violence against the Rohingya as if it
were the clash of religious communities.
It is actually ethnic persecution.
By releasing Aung San Suu Kyi
from house arrest and permitting her party to win a majority of seats in
Parliament, the Thein Sein military junta has lulled the world into the view
that Myanmar is “democratizing.” In fact,
the junta still holds a quarter of the seats in Parliament as well as the key
ministries of Defense, Home Affairs and Border Affairs. Western governments normalized relations and
rolled back economic, military and diplomatic sanctions.
In sharp contrast to the
official explanation of violence in Rakhine as communal, the present government
of Aung San Suu Kyi has sought to tell the world that her government is
fighting Rohingya Muslim extremists, who are spreading Islamic terrorism. In fact, there is no evidence of penetration
of radical Islamist terrorism amongst the Rohingya.
In disappointment with Aung San
Suu Kyi’s silence over the plight of Rohingyas, fellow Nobel Laureates and
world leaders have called on her to stop the genocide being perpetrated by the
Myanmar Army, whose partnership and cooperation she depends on for her
influence.
Not only have these calls
fallen on her deaf ears but they have become a laughing matter for Suu Kyi and
much of the Burmese population who remain enthralled with the woman whom they
call Mother.
Adama Dieng, UN Special Adviser
on the Prevention of Genocide, and Yanghee Lee, UN Special Rapporteur on the
situation of human rights in Myanmar, have requested independent UN investigations
on the alleged ‘ethnic cleansing’ and other mass atrocities in the Rohingya
region of Rakhine state.
Instead, Ms Suu Kyi’s
government announced the establishment of a “national inquiry commission” with
Vice President and ex-Lt-General Myint Swe, as the chair. Myint Swe is former head of Military
Intelligence. He coordinated the Border
Affairs Army Division, one of the worst persecutors of the Rohingya.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her
government brazenly deny that genocidal massacres are being perpetrated against
the Rohingya. When a Nobel Peace Prize
winner laughs out loud at allegations of genocide, she should give back her
prize. In fact she should be prosecuted
for complicity in the crimes.
Watch Video clip of Dr.Maung Zarni: https://youtu.be/IX_tFNtYmfk
Watch Video clip of Suu Kyi: https://youtu.be/k7CIrDaw-WA
Dr. Maung Zarni coordinated the consumer boycott of Burma in
support of the National League for Democracy from 1995-2004. He now lives in England.
Dr. Gregory Stanton is founding President of Genocide Watch
and Research Professor at George Mason University, USA. He drafted the UN Resolutions that created
the Rwanda Tribunal (ICTR) as well as the Rules of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
(ECCC.)