George Monbiot - Take away Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel peace prize. She no longer deserves it
Few of us expect much
from political leaders: to do otherwise is to invite despair. But to Aung San Suu Kyi we
entrusted our hopes. To mention her name was to invoke patience and resilience
in the face of suffering, courage and determination in the unyielding struggle
for freedom. She was an inspiration to us all. She has denied the
very identity of the people being attacked, asking the US ambassador not to use
the term Rohingya
Friends of mine
devoted their working lives to the campaign for her release from the many years
of detention imposed by the military dictatorship of Myanmar, and for the
restoration of democracy. We celebrated when she was awarded the Nobel peace prize in
1991; when she was finally released from house arrest in 2010; and when she won
the general election in 2015.None of this is
forgotten. Nor are the many cruelties she suffered, including isolation,
physical attacks and the junta’s curtailment of her family life. But it is hard
to think of any recent political leader by whom such high hopes have been so
cruelly betrayed. By any standards,
the treatment
of the Rohingya people, a Muslim minority in Myanmar, is repugnant. By the
standards Aung San Suu Kyi came to symbolise, it is grotesque. They have been
described by the UN as “the
world’s most persecuted minority”, a status that has not changed since she
took office.
The Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide describes five acts, any
one of which, when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, amounts to genocide. With the
obvious and often explicit purpose of destroying this group, four of them have
been practised more or less continuously by Myanmar’s armed forces since Aung
San Suu Kyi became de facto political leader. I recognise that the
armed forces retain great power in Myanmar, and that Aung San Suu Kyi does not
exercise effective control over them. I recognise 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.
I doubt she has read
the UN
human rights report on the treatment of the Rohingyas, released in
February. The crimes it revealed were horrific. It documents the mass rape of
women and girls, some of whom died as a result of the sexual injuries they
suffered. It shows how children and adults had their throats slit in front of
their families. It reports the summary executions of teachers, elders and
community leaders; helicopter gunships randomly spraying villages with gunfire;
people shut in their homes and burnt alive; a woman in labour beaten by
soldiers, her baby stamped to death as it was born. It details the deliberate
destruction of crops and the burning of villages to drive entire populations
out of their homes; people trying to flee gunned down in their boats. And this
is just one report. Amnesty International published a similar dossier last
year. There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that these actions are an
attempt to eliminate this ethnic group from Myanmar.
Hard as it is to
imagine, this campaign of terror has escalated
in recent days. Refugees arriving in Bangladesh report widespread
massacres. Malnutrition ravages the Rohingya, afflicting
80,000 children. In response Aung San
Suu Kyi has blamed
these atrocities, in a chillingly remote interview, on insurgents, and
expressed astonishment that anyone would wish to fight the army when the
government has done so much for them. Perhaps this astonishment comes easily to
someone who has never
visited northern Rakhine state, where most of this is happening… read more:
