Noble prize winner's shame

IN HER 2012 Nobel lecture, Myanmar’s de-facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, made an impassioned appeal to the world not to forget those who are suffering “hunger, disease, displacement, joblessness, poverty, injustice, discrimination, prejudice, bigotry” and war. Aung San Suu Kyi declared, “Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.” This is not the world of the Rohingya in today’s Myanmar.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the same beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner, is presiding over an ethnic cleansing in which villages are burned, women raped and children butchered. Aung San Suu Kyi, the widow who defied Myanmar’s dictators, endured a total of 15 years of house arrest and led a campaign for democracy, was a hero of modern times. Yet today Suu Kyi, as the effective leader of Myanmar, is chief apologist for this ethnic cleansing, as the country oppresses the darker-skinned Rohingya and denounces them as terrorists and illegal immigrants. For shame, Suu Kyi was honored for fighting for freedom and now She uses that freedom to condone the butchery of their own people?

• On Aug. 25, fighters from a small militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, staged surprise raids on 30 police stations and an army base in Rakhine State, where many Rohingya live. The attacks, in which 110 people died, including 10 policemen and many of the militants, triggered a crackdown by Myanmar’s military.
• Since then Buddhist-majority Myanmar has systematically slaughtered civilians belonging to the Rohingya Muslim minority, forcing over 400,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, with Myanmar soldiers shooting at them even as they cross the border.
• And “ethnic cleansing” may be an understatement. Even before the latest wave of terror, the brutality toward the Rohingya might qualify as genocide.
• But Myanmar denies carrying out atrocities against the Muslim minority, consisting of around 1.2 million people in the northern Rakhine state who have been refused citizenship of any country.
• They are raping women, looting homes, burning houses, shooting people, killing children, infants thrown into river, decapitating veterans etc. 
• A reporter covering this described “I’ve covered refugee crises before, and this was by far the worst thing that I’ve ever seen.”
• Suu Kyi genuinely believes that Rohingya are outsiders and troublemakers. But she knows that any sympathy for the Rohingya would be disastrous politically for her party in a country deeply hostile to its Muslim minority.
• Aung San Suu Kyi was applauded when she received her Nobel Prize because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny. Now that she’s in power, she symbolizes cowardly complicity in the deadly tyranny being visited on the Rohingya.
• “My dear sister: If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep” -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote a pained letter to her. 
• Rohingya were confined to concentration camps or to remote villages. Many were systematically denied medical care, and children were barred from public schools. It’s a 21st-century apartheid.
• Suu Kyi and other Myanmar officials refuse to use the word “Rohingya,” seeing them as just illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, but that’s absurd. Evidence exits to prove that Rohingya population was well established even before 1799.
• At the end Myanmar government will respond to pressure, because that’s what won Suu Kyi her freedom. Yet there has been far too little outcry for the Rohingya. Pope Francis being an exception among world leaders and speaking up for them. He said "Strong political leverages need to be exercised to stop this egregious assault on a stateless people." 
• UN has previously dubbed the Rohingyas, who are also denied access to university education and in 2013 were hit with a two-child policy, as “the most oppressed people on Earth”.
• There are petitions online calling for Suu Kyi to be stripped of her Nobel, but there is no mechanism to take away the prize.

Ignoring a possible genocide only encourages the persecutors.

Aung San Suu Kyi presiding over 'ethnic cleansing' and killing and/or driving out ethnic Rohingya doesn't befit her Nobel Prize winner status. Unfortunately Rohingya are without any kind of citizenship and a friendless community and are destined to suffer like Tamils in Sri Lanka. No one in the world is really bothered about them. Bangladesh was kind enough to accommodate them as illegal immigrants and provide shelter, at least for the time being. Modi is attempting to deport 40,000 Rohingya in India just because they are Muslims, labeling them as possible terrorists, despite no crime records against them, ignoring India has accommodated refugees from Tibet, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Sri Lanka etc in the past who are largely Hindus. UNO and the champions of humanity are silent? Why?