Suu Kyi silent on Rohingya
There’s a population of around a million people living in fear right now, facing the likely wrath of an uncaring government that doesn’t seem to recognize their claim to the country they have always called home. The crisis along the Myanmar-Bangladesh border has dramatically intensified in the past week, with more than 125,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing a Burmese military offensive in restive Rakhine state, according to aid organizations. Reports keep flooding in of mass killings carried out by Burmese security forces, as well as torture, rape and the systematic razing of Rohingya villages.
Burmese authorities say they are carrying out “clearance operations”
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against extremist “Bengali” insurgents — “Bengali” being a term the government uses to suggest Rohingyas are foreign interlopers rather than native Burmese. A growing chorus of Muslim leaders around the world has condemned Myanmar’s actions, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dubbed a “genocide.”
In the eye of the storm is Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s long-celebrated Nobel peace laureate who is the nation’s de facto civilian leader (she is formally barred from the presidency because members of her family are foreign citizens). For more than two decades, Suu Kyi occupied a hallowed place in the global imagination as a political prisoner, champion of democracy and relentless opponent of the brutal military junta that long dominated Burmese politics. She was, in essence, Asia’s Nelson Mandela, a picture of grace and moral authority.
But when it comes to the Rohingya, Suu Kyi has shown little interest in “reconciliation.” Myanmar’s population is a fractious, multi-religious patchwork of dozens of ethnic groups, but no community has been more neglected than the Rohingya, whom the junta stripped of their citizenship rights in 1982. They have lived in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine ever since.
Rights groups have warned of the vulnerability of the Rohingya for quite some time.
“The de facto leader needs to step in — that is what we would expect from any government, to protect everybody within their own jurisdiction,” said Yanghee Lee, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, who suggested that more than 1,000 Rohingya have been killed in the past week.
Yet Suu Kyi has remained conspicuously silent about the reported atrocities. Defenders of Suu Kyi argue that she has to walk a delicate line with the Burmese military, which not so long ago was her jailer and remains backed by an increasingly vocal constituency of Buddhist nationalists.
But beyond her many years of silence, Suu Kyi has also not lifted the state’s severe restrictions on humanitarian access to various regions of Myanmar affected by insurgency. Neither have authorities allowed news media to thoroughly investigate what is happening in Rakhine.