‘Still waiting’ for Suu Kyi to condemn massacres
TEKNAF, BANGLADESH • As far as the eye can see, they trudge through treacherously deep mud, across rice paddy fields and past rainswollen creeks into Bangladesh. Exhausted mothers clutch listless infants. Catatonically terrified children cling to bone-weary fathers. Young children with blank eyes carry even younger siblings.
As tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims continue to flee from persecution and killing in their home in Myanmar, the silence of the country’s de facto leader, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi, is drawing increasing criticism.
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani Nobel peace laureate, and Muslim leaders across Asia have led a global outcry over Myanmar’s brutal crackdown on the Rohingya minority and the failure of Suu Kyi to stop it.
“Stop the violence. Today we have seen pictures of small children killed by Burma’s security forces,” said Yousafzai in a statement on Twitter. “Over the last several years, I have repeatedly condemned this tragic and shameful treatment. I am still waiting for my fellow Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same. The world is waiting and the Rohingya Muslims are waiting.”
Suu Kyi has not spoken publicly since Aug. 25 — the day violence broke out. Fighters of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked government troops and prompted Myanmar soldiers to retaliate with “clearance operations” they say were aimed at flushing insurgents out from Rohingya villages.
The Myanmar government blames the insurgents for setting fire to their own homes and killing Buddhists in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine. The exhausted and starving refugees pouring into Bangladesh tell a different story: of targeted shootings by Myanmar troops; of warnings to leave their homes if they wanted to live.
Fortify Rights, a human rights organization, has documented allegations of heinous crimes against entire families.
“State security forces have been killing men, women and children. They have been slitting throats, there have been beheadings. Soldiers have opened fire on groups of people and then set the bodies on fire, including children,” said Matthew Smith, the group’s chief executive.
The violence has prompted an exodus of 123,000 people to flee into Bangladesh.
On a mound of river clay, Dilara Begum sat, too exhausted to move as the halfnaked son she cradled in one arm ran his tongue over his chapped lips. Two other children filled a plastic water bottle with the swirling brown river water and then each took small sips in turn.
The Myanmar army burnt the houses in Begum’s village near the town of Maungdaw as the residents fled.
“I’m very hungry,” Begum said in a low moan. She could not remember when the family last ate. She had no food and hardly any money left after paying a smuggler about $9 per person in her family to be carried across the river in a rickety boat.
The Rohingya Muslims have faced systematic persecution at the hands of the Buddhist majority for decades. The military junta that ruled the nation for decades stripped them of their citizenship. The democratically elected government under the leadership of Suu Kyi has looked the other way as they have since been pushed into squalid camps in their own home towns and villages.
For 15 years, Suu Kyi was held under house arrest but still became a potent symbol of democracy and one of the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience.
In a November 2015 election, her party, the National League for Democracy, came to power and she became the country’s de facto leader.
As the crisis deepens, governments and international figures have begun to speak out against the Myanmar government and Suu Kyi.
Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said the situation in Rakhine was “really grave” and it was time for Suu Kyi to “step in”.
“The de facto leader needs to step in — that is what we would expect from any government, to protect everybody within their own jurisdiction,” she said.