The Washington Post: The shameful silence of Aung San Suu Kyi

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 Burma-Bangladesh border has dramatically intensified over 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. [...]

But when it comes to the Rohingya, Suu Kyi has shown little interest in “reconciliation.” Burma'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, and observers see the growing insurgency there more as the symptom of decades of government abuse and persecution than the flourishing of foreign Islamist militant networks on Burmese soil. [...]

“I recognize that the armed forces retain great power in Burma, and that Aung San Suu Kyi does not exercise effective control over them,” wrote Guardian columnist George Monbiot. “I recognize that the scope of her actions is limited. But, as well as a number of practical and legal measures that she could use directly to restrain these atrocities, she possesses one power in abundance: the power to speak out. Rather than deploying it, her response amounts to a mixture of silence, the denial of well-documented evidence, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.” [...]

While some critics are now calling for her Nobel Peace Prize to be rescinded, an editorial in The Washington Post urged Suu Kyi to heed the words of her own 2012 Nobel acceptance speech: “Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless,” Suu Kyi said, “a world of which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace.”

read the article