A Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Shame

Aung San Suu Kyi, a beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner, is presiding over an ethnic cleansing in which villages are burned, women raped and children butchered.

Daw 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 Daw Suu, 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, Daw Suu. We honored you and fought for your freedom — and now you use that freedom to condone the butchery of your own people?
.. “My two nephews, their heads were cut off,” one Rohingya survivor told Smith. “One was 6 years old and the other was 9.”
.. Other accounts describe soldiers throwing infants into a river to drown, and decapitating a grandmother
.. When a Rohingya woman bravely recounted how her husband had been shot dead and how she and three teenage girls had been gang-raped by soldiers, Daw Suu’s Facebook page mocked the claims as “fake rape.”
.. she knows that any sympathy for the Rohingya would be disastrous politically for her party in a country deeply hostile to its Muslim minority.
.. “We applauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she received her Nobel Prize because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny,” noted Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Now that she’s in power, she symbolizes cowardly complicity in the deadly tyranny being visited on the Rohingya.”
.. 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.
.. Daw Suu and other Myanmar officials refuse to use the word “Rohingya,” seeing them as just illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, but that’s absurd. A document from 1799 shows that even then, the Rohingya population was well established.
.. A basic lesson of history: Ignoring a possible genocide only encourages the persecutors.