An ‘honorary Canadian’ presides over bloodbath

Sometimes I am convinced that Canada is a name that will endure through the ages and travel with mankind throughout the galaxy. Sometimes I am convinced that we should be considered exclusively as a subject for absurdist fairy tales, a real-life Ruritania or Grand Fenwick. I guess it goes about 50-50. But I am afraid the emerging controversy over Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship puts us firmly in kooky Zembla territory.

The present State Counsellor of Burma was the fourth person ever to receive this distinction. Now we are talking about withdrawing her honorary citizenship because, as first minister of Burma, she has been heavily implicated in massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people of the country’s Rakhine state.

One in four: not such a great batting average, is it? Our political class devised the highest and most permanent form of honour that could be envisioned for a foreign do-gooder, and literally the fourth person on the entire surface of the planet who was deemed to have met the criteria went and became CEO of a genocide. What does this suggest about the collective judgment of Canada’s elite? You don’t suppose anyone is going to lose a job over this, do you?

We know why Aung San Suu Kyi was singled out to receive honorary Canadian citizenship. It was a gesture of solidarity with Burma’s democratic opposition at an especially dangerous moment, when the lady was under indefinite house arrest and appeared to be in danger of worse reprisals from the country’s secretive, weird military junta. As the picturesque daughter of the founder of independent Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi represented a unique fulcrum for moral influence on the Burmese generals.

Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar) is a country where authoritarian tendencies can be contained somewhat by exterior activity. (Or, to say what I mean: it isn’t China.) It is a federation in both practice and spirit, with a strong Buddhist clergy and a variety of political traditions, and the old “Peace and Development Council” was more of a dealmaking body than a centralist cult of the nation, despite grandiose moves like the creation of a new Brasilia/ Canberra-style capital, Naypyidaw, in 2005.

Even while penned on her estate, Aung San Suu Kyi exercised a political power that was more than purely moral in nature. She was someone who could not be killed with impunity, or they’d have done it. The abortive “Saffron Revolution” of 2007, accompanied by some bloodletting, showed the junta that it was at risk of reaction from surviving elements of Burmese civil society, and the “Peace and Development” gang decided on modernization and democratization.

Aung San Suu Kyi ended up at the top of the political heap in this process. It is hard to tell how much direct responsibility she has, as head of the Burmese government, for the persecution of the Rohingya: it is an outof-control ethno-religious conflict in a border zone — what, in an old European state, would have been called a “march.” But Burmese nationality law has left the Rohingya vulnerable by making them non-citizens, and the State Counsellor’s record on the conflict is, at best, one of cowardice and cynical dissimulation. (Don’t, for example, use the word “Rohingya” in conversation with her if you want to stay on her good side.) She preached non-violence and political openness in opposition, but behaves differently in power.

This is hardly some kind of stunning historic novelty, to say the least. But the Canadian establishment does not seem to have seen it coming. You can argue that the extension of honorary citizenship to Aung San Suu Kyi is not to be regretted anyway. Perhaps, in the spirit of Canadian selfabsorption, we can take some credit for having helped to create a more democratic Burma. The problem here is that the ethnic cleansing, combined with the secondclass status that the junta’s law gave the Rohingya, might be an unintended consequence of democratization in a country with a dominant religion (one that is not as gentle and groovy as its popular reputation in the West would suggest) and a military under tenuous civilian control. Oops?

Our prime minister is now spitballing the idea of having Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary citizenship withdrawn, and one supposes that if this might help save innocent lives, it ought to be considered, even at the price of turning this concocted showpiece institution of “honorary citizenship” into garbage. One of the essential meanings of citizenship is that it cannot be withdrawn, even with due process, even when a citizen has perpetrated unspeakable crimes. “Honorary citizenship” does not confer the legal rights of the real thing, but surely it is at least supposed to resemble the real thing — to represent a commitment of analogous significance and irreversibility as that which we enter into with immigrants taking the oath and joining the club over at the courthouse.

Since honorary citizenship is not conferred by Parliament, it is not clear that it could be revoked by Parliament. Probably an Order-in-Council would do (because, again, no enforceable rights are at stake). If this is done in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, it seems obvious that we should just put the institution in abeyance for a century or so. Let later generations see if they can manage not to screw up this honorary citizenship thing so thoroughly.