By @mehdirhasan
April 13, 2017
AUNG SAN
SUU KYI IS ONE of the
most celebrated human rights icons of our age: Nobel Peace Laureate, winner of
the Sakharov Prize, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an Amnesty
International-recognized prisoner of conscience for 15 long years.
These days, however,
she is also an apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape.
For the past year,
Aung San Suu Kyi has been State Counselor, or de facto head of government, in
Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the northern Rakhine
state have been shot, stabbed, starved, robbed, raped and driven from their
homes in the hundreds of thousands. In December, while the world focused on the
fall of Aleppo, more than a dozen Nobel Laureates published an open letter
warning of a tragedy in Rakhine “amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes
against humanity.”
In February, a report
by the United Nations documented how the Burmese army’s attacks on the Rohingya
were “widespread as well as systematic” thus “indicating the very likely
commission of crimes against humanity.” More than half of the 101 Rohingya
women interviewed by UN investigators across the border in Bangladesh said they
had suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence at the hands of security
forces. “They beat and killed my husband with a knife,” one survivor recalled.
“Five of them took off my clothes and raped me. My eight-month old son was
crying of hunger when they were in my house because he wanted to breastfeed, so
to silence him they killed him too with a knife.”
And the response of
Aung San Suu Kyi? This once-proud campaigner against wartime rape and human
rights abuses by the Burmese military has opted to borrow from the Donald Trump
playbook of denial and deflection. Her office accused Rohingya women of
fabricating stories of sexual violence and put the words “fake rape” — in the
form of a banner headline, no less — on its official website. A spokesperson
for the Foreign Ministry — also controlled directly by Aung San Suu Kyi —
dismissed “made-up stories, blown out of proportion.” In February, the State
Counselor herself reportedly told the Archbishop of Yangon, Charles Bo, that
the international community is exaggerating the Rohingya issue.
It was all supposed
to be so different. In November 2015, Myanmar held its first contested national
elections after five decades of military rule. An overwhelming victory for Aung
San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and
former political prisoner, was going to usher in a new era of democracy, human
rights and respect for minorities. That, at least, was the hope.
The reality has been
very different. Less than a year after taking office, Burmese security forces
launched a brutal crackdown on the Rohingya after an attack on a border outpost
in Rakhine killed nine police officers in October. The northern portion of the
state was sealed off by the military and humanitarian aid was blocked, as was
access to foreign journalists and human rights groups. Hundreds of Rohingya
Muslims are believed to have been slaughtered and tens of thousands driven
across the border into Bangladesh.
This is only the
latest chapter in the anti-Rohingya saga. The Muslim residents of Rakhine have
been subjected to violent attacks by the military since 2012 and were stripped
of citizenship, and rendered stateless, as long ago as 1982. The 1-million odd
Rohingya Muslims live in apartheid-like conditions: denied access to
employment, education and healthcare, forced to obtain permission to marry and
subjected to a discriminatory “two-child” policy. “About 10 percent are held in
internment camps,” according to Patrick Winn, Asia correspondent for Public
Radio International. “The rest are quarantined in militarized districts and
forbidden to travel.”
The standard Western
media narrative is to accuse The Lady, as she is known by her admirers, of silence
and of a grotesque failure to speak out against these human rights abuses. In
an editorial last May, the New York Times denounced Suu Kyi’s “cowardly stance
on the Rohingya.”
Yet hers is not
merely a crime of omission, a refusal to denounce or condemn. Hers are much
worse crimes of commission. She took a deliberate decision to try and discredit
the Rohingya victims of rape. She went out of her way to accuse human rights
groups and foreign journalists of exaggerations and fabrications. She demanded
that the U.S. government stop using the name “Rohingya” — thereby perpetuating
the pernicious myth that the Muslims of Rakhine are “Bengali” interlopers
(rather than a Burmese community with a centuries-long presence inside
Myanmar.) She also appointed a former army general to investigate the recent
attacks on the Rohingya and he produced a report in January that, not
surprisingly, whitewashed the well-documented crimes of his former colleagues
in the Burmese military.
Silence, therefore,
is the least of her sins. Silence also suggests a studied neutrality. Yet there
is nothing neutral about Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance. She has picked her side and
it is the side of Buddhist nationalism and crude Islamophobia.
In 2013, after an
interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain, Aung San Suu Kyi complained, “No one
told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim.” In 2015, ahead of historic
parliamentary elections, the NLD leader purged her party of all Muslim
candidates, resulting in the country’s first legislature without any Muslim
representation whatsoever. Like a Burmese Steve Bannon, she paranoiacally
speaks of “global Muslim power” being “very great” — only 4 percent of the
Burmese population, incidentally, is Muslim — while conspiratorially dismissing
reports of Buddhist-orchestrated massacres in Rakhine as “Muslims killing
Muslims.”
This is a form of
genocide denial, delivered in a soft tone and posh voice by a telegenic Nobel
Peace Prize winner. Genocide, though, sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it?
Pro-Rohingya propaganda, perhaps? Yet independent study after independent study
has come to the same stark and depressing conclusion: genocide is being carried
out against the Rohingya. For example, an October 2015 legal analysis by the
Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School,
found “strong evidence… that genocidal acts have been committed against
Rohingya” and “that such acts have been committed with the intent to destroy
the Rohingya, in whole or in part.”
Another report
published in the same month, by the International State Crime Initiative at
Queen Mary University of London, concluded that “the Rohingya face the final
stages of genocide” and noted how “state-sponsored stigmatisation,
discrimination, violence and segregation … make precarious the very existence
of the Rohingya.”
Aung San Suu Kyi,
argues Maung Zarni, a Burmese scholar and founder of the Free Burma Coalition,
holds “genocidal views towards the Rohingya” because “she denies Rohingya
identity and history.” Genocide, he tells me, “begins with an attack on
identity and history. The victims never existed and … will never exist.”
The State Counselor,
from this perspective, is not simply standing by as genocide occurs; she is
legitimizing, encouraging and enabling it. When a legendary champion of human
rights is in charge of a government that undertakes military operations against
“terrorists,” smearing and discrediting the victims of gang rape and loudly
denying the burning down of villages and forced expulsion of families, it makes
it much harder for the international community to highlight those crimes, let
alone intervene to halt them. In recent years, in fact, Western governments
have been rolling back political and economic sanctions on Myanmar, citing the
country’s “progress“on democracy and pointing to the election victory of Aung
San Suu Kyi and her NLD.
Politicians and
pundits in the West, observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as
“their liberal darling — petite, attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman
with the most prestigious pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don,
connected with the British Establishment.” Belatedly, the West’s journalists,
diplomats and human rights groups “are waking up to the ugly realities that she
is neither principled nor liberal,” he adds.
It may be too little
and too late, however. Around 1,000 Rohinga are believed to have been killed
since October and more than 70,000 have been forced to flee the country. Yet
Aung San Suu Kyi continues to shamelessly tell interviewers, such as the BBC’s
Fergal Keane last week, that there is no ethnic cleansing going on and that the
Burmese military are “not free to rape, pillage and torture” in Rakhine. Is
this the behavior of a Mandela… or a Mugabe?
“Saints should
always be judged guilty,” wrote George Orwell, in his famous 1949 essay on
Mahatma Gandhi, “until they are proved innocent.” There is no evidence of
innocence when it comes to Aung San Suu Kyi and her treatment of the Rohingya —
only complicity and collusion in unspeakable crimes. This supposed saint is now
an open sinner. The former political prisoner and democracy activist has turned
into a genocide-denying, rape-excusing, Muslim-bashing Buddhist nationalist.
Forget the house arrest and the Nobel Prize. This is how history will remember
The Lady of Myanmar.