Myanmar: Time to Walk the Walk
After her party’s stunning electoral victory, will Aung San Suu Kyi finally take action to protect the Rohingya?
Myanmar’s first free elections in 25 years have resulted in a decisive victory for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), led by celebrated human rights activist and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. This has been called a “milestone” for Myanmar’s transition to democracy, and rightly so; a country that has been ruled by its military for most of the past five decades now has a real chance to throw off that legacy. Having won the elections, the NLD and Suu Kyi must now confront the challenge of building a stable civilian government, a far more difficult task than winning a single election. But there is also another, more urgent issue facing Suu Kyi, one on which she has consistently and puzzlingly refused to take a position: the status of Myanmar’s critically threatened Rohingya minority.
While the full results are still not in, the NLD has won 348 seats across both houses of Myanmar’s parliament, 19 more than needed to form a majority and a stunning total, considering that a quarter of the seats in both houses have been reserved for appointment by Myanmar’s powerful military. Both Myanma President Thien Sein, of the ruling Union Solidarity Development Party (USDP), and General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in-chief of the armed forces, have congratulated Suu Kyi on her party’s electoral victory and pledged to cooperate with her in a national reconciliation process. But these elections were marred by the systematic disenfranchisement of most of Myanmar’s Muslim population, Rohingya or not, and by the fact that the NLD barred Muslim candidates from standing for office. Myanmar won’t achieve real democracy until all of its people are able to participate fully in society and in the political process — including the Rohingya.
“One of the world’s most persecuted minorities”
There are approximately 1.3 million Rohingya living in Myanmar, concentrated in the Rakhine State along its western coastline — a small Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist nation. They have been described as “one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.” They live in apartheid conditions — stateless (they were stripped of their Burmese citizenship in 1982), forced to live cordoned off in enclosed camps, subject to government-imposed birth limits, and vulnerable to attacks from Buddhist mobs inspired by the Burmese nationalist 969 Movement. The government’s official position is that the Rohingya are “illegal immigrants” from neighboring Bangladesh, which is contradicted by evidence of their presence in Rakhine at least as far bad as the late 18th century, and is at any rate totally irrelevant to the question of whether or not they ought to be dehumanized and exterminated.
The plight of the Rohingya briefly garnered international attention earlier this year, when thousands of Rohingya attempting to flee conditions in Myanmar were left adrift on the Andaman Sea by the unscrupulous human traffickers they’d hired to take them elsewhere. However, that refugee crisis was quickly forgotten amid the successive refugee crises that have embroiled Europe over the past several months. It’s also been difficult for the Rohingya to gain attention because the story of their repression contradicts the much happier tale of Myanmar’s struggle to throw off military rule and embrace democracy, a struggle in which Suu Kyi has played the largest public role. The international community has largely avoided raising the Rohingya issue out of fear that doing so might cause Myanmar’s military establishment to abandon democratic reforms.
Meanwhile, however, the Rohingya suffer, and their suffering has reached critical levels. An investigation by the Yale University School of Law recently concluded that there is “strong evidence” of an orchestrated genocide being carried out against the Rohingya by Myanmar’s government and its Buddhist majority. Another recent report, by the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University of London, “found compelling evidence that the Rohingya face mass annihilation and are in the final stages of a genocidal process.” If nobody either inside or outside of Myanmar takes some action to protect them soon, regardless of how such action might affect the country’s progress toward democratic governance, the Rohingya may cease to exist altogether.
“Tantamount to complicity” in genocide
Few would question Aung San Suu Kyi’s credentials as a political reformer and an advocate for democracy. In addition to her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, she was given the Congressional Gold Medal, the U.S. Congress’s highest civilian honor, in 2008. She spent 15 of the 21 years between 1989 and 2010 under house arrest, a prisoner of the military junta that has ruled Myanmar since the 1960s. Suu Kyi has met multiple times with President Barack Obama, who clearly sees her as the champion of Burmese democracy, although he has gently prodded her to do more for the Rohingya. But that’s what makes her almost total unwillingness to do anything for them so conspicuous. Suu Kyi won’t even acknowledge the reality of the Rohingya’s desperate situation. She has in the past actually denied that the Rohingya face ethnic cleansing, when the evidence clearly shows otherwise, and has attributed violence in Rakhine to “the fear felt by both sides,” an inadequate response to what has been a very one-sided conflict. Her handling of the Rohingya issue has been described by human rights activists as “disappointing” — Penny Green, the director of the ISCI, wrote in May that Suu Kyi’s silence on the Rohingya is “tantamount to complicity” in their genocide.
Suu Kyi has argued that she can only work to “reconcile” Rakhine’s Buddhist and Muslim communities if she avoids taking a side. But this is a case of genocide, not a dispute between neighboring communities, and her silence has become deafening. Some have speculated that her reluctance to address the Rohingya issue stems from a desire to avoid alienating Myanmar’s anti-Islam Buddhist voters in advance of elections. But the elections are over, and her party won a resounding victory, so she has no more reason to dodge the crisis. Myanmar’s fragile democratic reforms will amount to nothing if defending them means condemning an entire community to annihilation, and Suu Kyi’s reformist legacy will not survive her unwillingness to stand up for her nation’s most vulnerable people.
