When Silence Speaks Volumes
Affnaffee Rahman reflects on Aung San Suu Kyi’s lack of response to the Rohingya crisis
In 1991 Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Her relentless struggle towards achieving democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation in Myanmar led the world to recognise her as a beacon of hope to a country plagued by years of conflict. She was the face of democracy in a region ruled by the military since 1962. She was to become more than just a leader.
Let us now fast forward to the Myanmar of 2017. The ‘Rohingya’ ethnic minority are victims of, perhaps, one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity. The UN has termed the Rohingyas the world’s ‘most persecuted’ group, as thousands of human beings are killed in broad daylight everyday. Women are gang-raped and brutally murdered, infants stamped to death and entire villages incinerated as people are forced back to their homes and locked up by the Burmese military. The crossing of borders to Bangladesh is anything but easy when the path is full of land mines. Some make it, others don’t. The video footage and still images of the torture in the region are unimaginable for the sane human mind to contemplate.
Aung San Suu Kyi is the de facto leader of Myanmar, elected the State Chancellor two years ago. It was finally time for this more-than-just-a-leader figure to uphold the human rights she spoke of in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It was time that she finally acted upon what she believed. It was Suu Kyi that said ‘our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless, 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.’
So how has Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s state chancellor, responded to the Rohingya crisis? Silence. Absolute silence. She refused to call it an ‘ethnic cleansing’ in an interview with the BBC in 2013; reality seems to be speaking the opposite. Suu Kyi remains mute and unable to speak the truth, condemn the killings of the innocent or even come close to acknowledging the atrocities that are happening in her backyard. In her address to the nation she talked about human rights abuses and how they must be condemned. She said her government ‘does not fear international scrutiny’, yet UN investigations teams are being denied access. She said, ‘We want to find out why this exodus is happening’ and speaks of a ‘verification process’, never specifying how such a process must be put into place.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence in the face of the Rohingya crisis speaks volumes about her character. She was once a champion of human rights, but now puts her political interests as more important.
Affnaffee Rahman
