Suu Kyi’s ‘last chance’ to end Rohingya crisis
DESPITE INCREASING VIOLENCE, MYANMAR LEADER THOUGHT UNLIKELY TO REVERSE POSITION IN SPEECH TUESDAY
Aung San Suu Kyi was supposed to be addressing the United Nations, and the world, this week at the annual general assembly in New York. Instead, the de facto leader of Myanmar will give a televised speech in her own country, breaking her near-silence on the humanitarian crisis as Rohingya refugees flee violence in her country and pour into neighbouring Bangladesh.
Suu Kyi’s speech Tuesday will be scrutinized intensely, with the UN chief Sunday calling it her “last chance” to stop the bloodshed.
“If she does not reverse the situation now, then I think the tragedy will be absolutely horrible, and unfortunately then I don’t see how this can be reversed in the future,” Antonio Guterres told the BBC.
This week could prove pivotal for the crisis as Bangladeshi authorities struggle to get the refugee situation under control. More than 410,000 people from the Rohingya minority Muslim group have now crossed the border.
Suu Kyi’s image as a human rights campaigner has been tarnished after she failed to intervene in the crackdown, which started on Aug. 25, when the military in Buddhist-majority Myanmar launched operations in Rakhine state.
The army says its “clearance operations” in the area are aimed at flushing out Rohingya militants who had attacked police posts.
Violence has since engulfed the border region, with reports emerging of Rohingya villages being razed and civilians being cut down as they try to flee. The UN has branded the so-called security offensive a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
However, Suu Kyi, a 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was granted honorary Canadian citizenship in 2007, has expressed no public concern for the Rohingya and has instead blamed “terrorists” for the violence, while also bemoaning “a huge iceberg of misinformation.”
Angelina Jolie, the actress and UN Special Envoy on refugees, Sunday condemned the conflict.
“It’s absolutely clear that the violence by the army needs to stop and that the return of the refugees has to be permitted — and that the Rohingya should be given civil rights,” she said. “We all wish that Aung San Suu Kyi will, in this situation, be the voice of human rights.”
Suu Kyi’s party took office last year as the first civilianled government in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, after 50 years of junta rule, but she has no power to control the army, which retains sweeping powers and controls the police and border forces.
“She’s signalling that her chief priority is the relationship between the government and military and that the pogrom is secondary to that,” Francis Wade, author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within, said of the position Suu Kyi has taken.
Meanwhile, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s army chief, has called for a “united” stance in handling the crisis but gave no sign of concessions. And Sunday, Myanmar’s government hinted it may not take back Rohingya who fled across the border, accusing those refugees of having links to the militants.
“Those who fled the villages made their way to the other country for fear of being arrested as they got involved in the violent attacks. Legal protection will be given to the villages whose residents did not flee,” the government said.
Analysts are not expecting Suu Kyi to change her position in Tuesday’s speech, which has to address the crisis without angering the military.
“Depressingly, her silence about the Rohingya makes her far more popular at home,” veteran journalist John Simpson wrote in an article for The Daily Telegraph. “There is little or no sympathy for them among ethnic Burmese, mostly Buddhists, who form the great majority of the country’s population.”
Over the weekend, Bangladeshi authorities told newly arrived Rohingya refugees that they must stay near the border — not move further into the country — and reminded Bangladeshi people they were not to rent housing to refugees. It came as aid agencies warned that Rohingyas fleeing the violence could die of starvation, exposure and dehydration as authorities began moving people to camps in order to streamline the distribution of help.
“Many people are arriving hungry, exhausted and with no food or water,” Mark Pierce, Bangladesh country director for the Save the Children aid agency said.
On Saturday, it was confirmed that two children and a woman died in a stampede to get aid in the Cox’s Bazar district, which is home to tens of thousands of Rohingyas. Heavy monsoon rain Sunday descended upon hundreds of thousands of people stuck in makeshift camps.