Don’t turn to Suu Kyi
A Nadministration that refuses UN investigators and the world’s media access to a state where it is believed genocide is taking place; a de facto leader who accuses aid workers of helping terrorists; and an office that accuses women of fabricating stories of sexual violence.
All of this isn’t happening under the watch of a mad dictatorship in an impoverished corner of the globe. These are the actions of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As we witness some of the bloodiest days of violence in a conflict that has been escalating since last October after decades of persecution against Rohingya – a group of people who have been stripped of citizenship and rendered stateless since 1982 – the world’s attention has once more turned to Myanmar.
In the latest round of violence, 18,000 Rohingya have fled in less than one week after the military launched a brutal crackdown in response to an attack by militants on border posts. The response by the Myanmar military over the last year has been one of collective punishment, including mass killings and the destruction of entire villages.
Yet for far too long many of the powerful governments in the West as well as the wider international community have pinned their hopes on finding a solution to the conflict onto Suu Kyi. Who better than a former prisoner of conscience, who used to deliver speeches about human rights while languishing under house arrest, to bring peace to a region scarred by conflict?
Yet this adoption by the international community of Aung San Suu Kyi as the liberal, Oxford educated saviour of Myanmar has not only failed to live up to expectations, but instead proved to be counterproductive after she delivered the very opposite response of what many expected of a Nobel peace laureate.
More than a dozen of her own fellow Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the UN Security Council in 2016 criticising her actions and warning of ethnic cleansing taking place against the Rohingya.
If this wasn’t enough to shatter the faith of so many who believe Suu Kyi is the solution to the conflict, her subsequent actions and pronouncements of denial and deflection have put her in the same category as US President Donald Trump.
Earlier this week her office accused aid workers of helping terrorists in Myanmar, a statement that was labelled “profoundly irresponsible” by a human rights group. Such statements cease to surprise me any longer. In 2013 after