Angry Geldof returns award over ‘genocide’
BOB Geldof handed back his Freedom of the City of Dublin award yesterday in protest against Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who also holds the honour.
Calling her a ‘handmaiden to genocide’, he criticised the Nobel peace laureate over her country’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority.
The 66-year-old rock singer, who was born and brought up near Dublin, returned the award at Dublin City Hall, claiming the council had been duped into recognising Miss Suu Kyi, 72.
Geldof, who received an honorary knighthood from the Queen in 1986 for his charity work, said he was a ‘proud Dubliner’ but could not continue to hold the freedom while she also held it.
City councillors have only bestowed the award on 82 people since 1876.
Miss Suu Kyi has been criticised internationally for standing by as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were driven out of their homes in Myanmar – the Buddhist nation formerly known as Burma.
The UN has called the military violence ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’.
Geldof added: ‘I do not wish to be associated in any way with an individual engaged in the mass ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people of northwest Burma.
‘I am a founding patron of the Aegis Trust, who are concerned with genocide prevention. I would be a hypocrite were I to share honours with one who has become at best an accomplice to murder, complicit in ethnic cleansing and a handmaiden to genocide.’
The UN now estimates the majority of Rohingya once living in the state of Rakhine in Myanmar – estimated at around one million – have fled a campaign of violence.
The Rohingya have been persecuted for decades in Myanmar, where they are denied citizenship and denigrated as illegal Bengali immigrants.
Miss Suu Kyi, who leads the country’s pro-democracy party, only visited northern Rakhine for the first time this month, having come under mounting pressure to halt the army crackdown on its Muslim inhabitants.
It was revealed last month that Miss Suu Kyi is to be stripped of her Freedom to the City of Oxford award because of her response to the Rohingya crisis.
She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 as a result of ‘her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights’ while she was held under house arrest for 15 years by the previous military junta in Myanmar.