IMMEDIATE RELEASE
5 May 2017
London: On May 8 (12 noon-2 pm), UK-based rights
activists and multi-ethnic refugees from Burma will be holding a rally at the
Guildhall to protest the City of London honouring the Myanmar State Counsellor,
Aung San Suu Kyi, with its Freedom of the City award.
The “Freedom of the City” award was first recorded in AD
1237 and connected to the ancient trade associations. Honourees are “enrolled
in a ceremony in Guildhall, when they receive a guide to conducting their lives
in an honourable fashion”.
The protest organizers say Aung San Suu Kyi has discarded
her oft-touted Buddhist principles of compassion and truthfulness or universal
human rights since entering into a partnership with the country’s most powerful
military a year ago.
In its editorial on 3 May, the Guardian wrote, “when Aung
San Suu Kyi was finally able to collect her Nobel peace prize in 2012, the
committee’s chairman described how her “firmness of principle” in the struggle
for human rights and democracy had made her “a moral leader for the whole
world”. Since taking power in Myanmar, the former political prisoner’s moral
credibility has been vastly diminished by her failure to even acknowledge the
brutal persecution of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state. A dozen fellow
Nobel peace laureates have lamented her inaction in the face of “a human
tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.
Ring Du Lachyung, Chairman of the Kachin National
Organization - UK, a well-known Kachin diaspora group, accuses the former
Burmese human rights icon of “being complicit” in the Burma army’s war crimes
against his Kachin people in Northern and Eastern Burma. “Since her first ever
return to London in 2012, she has adamantly refused to condemn the Burmese
military’s indiscriminate violence against our civilian communities including
rape, air strikes, and shelling of churches,” said Ring Du. He stressed that “Suu
Kyi chooses to ignore the fact that her military partners are the aggressor,
who are attacking our (Kachin) communities in our ancestral homeland adjacent
to India and China, in order to control our jade mines, fell our teak forests,
extract hydropower from our rivers for generating and exporting electricity to
China, and take over strategic border trade routes – without giving anything
back to our Kachin people.”
Ko Aung, a prominent Burmese exile and former political
prisoner, who has known the Burmese leader since he was a young university
student activist during the country’s nationwide uprisings in 1988, said, “Suu
Kyi has betrayed the cause of human rights in the name of political pragmatism.
Her pragmatic politics have ruined her reputation without ushering in any
tangible improvement in the lives of ordinary people or improving the general
human rights conditions for democracy activists.”
Under Aung San Suu Kyi’s watch, human rights conditions
are worsening not just for ethnic and religious minorities but also for Burmese
human rights activists and journalists.
Despite the allegations of war crimes and crimes against
humanity in ethnic minority regions and the persecution of journalists and
rights activists, British companies are eager to expand their business ties
with the Aung San Suu Kyi government. Reuters reported that the Anglo-Dutch
consumer goods maker Unilever (ULVR.L) (UNc.AS) just signed an expansive deal
in Myanmar in order to triple its current annual sale revenues of 100 million
euros (84.75 million pounds) by 2020.
Ring Du Lachyung, Kachin National Organization UK, 077
9235 7887
Tun Khin, Burmese Rohingya Organization UK, 078 8871 866
Marbur Ahmed, Restlessbeings, UK, 075 0610 0785
Ko Aung, Burmese dissident in exile & former Burmese
political prisoner, 077 6209 4562