AUNG SAN SUU KYI NOW BENEFITS FROM ASEAN SILENCE
When Aung San Suu Kyi led the fight for democracy against Myanmar’s despotic military rulers two decades ago, she bristled at the collective reluctance of Southeast Asian governments to intervene in her nation’s plight.
In a newspaper editorial published in 1999, the opposition leader then slammed the 10member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), saying its “policy of noninterference is just an excuse for not helping.”
“In this day and age,” she wrote in an editorial in Thailand’s The Nation newspaper on July 13 of that year, “you cannot avoid interference in the matters of other countries.”
Today, Suu Kyi leads Myanmar, formerly Burma. And at the Asean Summit in Manila on Monday, she’ll likely be counting on the bloc to keep silent while her government engages in a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims and uses tactics the United Nations has described as ethnic cleansing to force them to leave the predominantly Buddhist country.
But little is expected to be done at the Asean Summit on the plight of Rohingya Muslims—more than 600,000 of whom have fled to neighboring Bangladesh.
“Asean summits are not designed to actually construct policy responses to major human rights issues that affect the whole region,” said David Mathieson, a former human rights researcher who is now an independent analyst based in Myanmar. “Right now, Suu Kyi’s government is benefiting from Asean’s culture of inaction.”
No mention of Rohingya crisis
A draft of the Asean Summit communiqué makes no mention of the Rohingya crisis.
One paragraph of the communiqué, which was seen by Reuters on Monday, mentions the importance of humanitarian relief provided for victims of natural disasters in Vietnam and a recent urban battle with Islamist militants in the Philippines, as well as “affected communities” in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state.
As the current Asean chair, the Philippines drafted the statement that did not give any details of the situation in northern Rakhine or use the term Rohingya for the persecuted Muslim minority—which Suu Kyi has asked foreign leaders to avoid.
The refugee crisis began on Aug. 25 after Rohingya insurgents attacked several Myanmar police posts in northern Rakhine state. Security forces responded with brutal “clearance operations” that, according to human rights groups, killed hundreds of people and left hundreds of Rohingya villages burned to the ground.
Suu Kyi asks for patience
Survivors have described arson, rape and shootings by Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist mobs for the purpose of forcing Rohingya to leave. Myanmar has long denied the Rohingya citizenship and considered them illegal immigrants although they’ve lived in the country for generations.
The Rohingya crisis has sparked global outrage, and there have been calls for democracy champion Suu Kyi to be stripped of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize because she has not condemned the Myanmar military’s actions.
In a September speech, however, Myanmar’s erstwhile heroine who had been hailed by the Nobel committee for her “nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights” asked for patience from the international community.
She suggested the refugees were partly responsible for the crisis. She also tried to play down the gravity of the exodus, saying more than half of the Rohingya villages in Myanmar had not been destroyed.
Though Suu Kyi has been the de facto head of Myanmar’s civilian government since her party swept elections in 2015, she is limited in her control of the country by a constitution written by the military junta that had ruled Myanmar for decades.
The military is in charge of the operations in northern Rakhine, and ending the crackdown is not up to Suu Kyi. Still, her government has staunchly defended the military’s actions.
When the UN Security Council last week called for Myanmar to “end the excessive military force and intercommunal violence that had devastated the Rohingya community,” Suu Kyi’s office responded that it regretted the statement.
In an apparent reference to China, which has backed Myanmar, the Suu Kyi government praised Security Council members who “upheld the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries.”
Noninterference has long been a bedrock of Asean, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
SomeAsean members, particularly Muslim-majority Malaysia, have voiced concern. But, in keeping with Asean’s principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of one another, the issue appears to have been put aside at the summit.
Asean credibility at stake
Khin Zaw Win, a Yangonbased political analyst, said that both Myanmar’s previous military junta and Suu Kyi’s government had benefited from Asean’s reticence, but he added that the bloc should “take a firmer position” on the Rohingya issue.
“It has to be taken up if Asean is to remain credible,” he said.
Writing in The Nation in 1999, Suu Kyi said that when Asean invoked the principle of noninterference, it did so “not with a clear conscience.”
“They are afraid that there may be some aspects of their countries that might invite criticism,” she said. “Our position is that if they have problems that invite legitimate criticism, let there be criticism. If not, they have nothing to fear.”