The silence of Suu Kyi

“There are no more villages left, none at all”. The accounts of the systematic ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Myanmar, now effectively ruled by the world renowned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, are finally making it to the mainline news these days. “There are no more people left, either. It is all gone”.

The pathological hatred of Muslims ingrained in the leading US and European media (now aggressively replacing the historic anti-Semitism of these societies) scarcely allows them to see or to report the magnitude of the calamity masses of Muslims face at the hands of Myanmar security forces and the Buddhist nationalist vigilante mobs.

Just imagine, for a minute, if it were Jews or Christians, or else the ‘peaceful Buddhists’ who were the subjects of Muslim persecutions. Compare the amount of airtime given to murderous Muslims of ISIL as opposed to the scarcity of news about the murderous Buddhists of Myanmar. Something in the liberal fabric of Euro-American imagination is cancerously callous. It does not see Muslims as complete human beings.

“Nearly 20,000 Rohingya flee to Bangladesh from Myanmar,” Al Jazeera reports, “refugee flow gathers pace amid renewed fighting as the international community expresses concern for civilian safety”.

“More than 100 Rohingya Muslims massacred in Rakhine state,” other reports confirm, as the icon of human rights in the West, the sweetheart of every single European and US leader, Ms Suu Kyi has either remained deadly silent on the slaughter of innocent human beings or else dismissed such widely reported facts as “propaganda”.         

“I don’t think there is ethnic cleaning going on,” Suu Kyi told the BBC in April. “I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening”. Why so? What word should we use to please Her Majesty’s lexicography of murder and mayhem?

“It is not just a matter of ethnic cleansing as you put it,” she said. “It is a matter of people on different sides of the divide, and this divide we are trying to close up.”

Is this Trumpian charlatanism at work in Myanmar or is it another entirely different kind of Aung San Suu Kyi Newspeak? Hard to tell. But more urgently: Does this shameless power monger deserve to carry the title of a ‘Nobel Peace Prize laureate?’

“No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim,” she complained indignantly in 2013, after a BBC reporter questioned her hypocrisy in refusing to address the slaughter of Muslims in Myanmar. The more blatant her hateful racism is and the more evident her implication in the ethnic cleansing of her country, the more the Norwegian Nobel Committee must ask itself about the moral grounding of bestowing any such honour on the next recipient.

Nobel Peace Prize has become something of a global recognition. The fact, however, is that it is a Swedish-Norwegian, or Scandinavian-European, or as they say ‘Western’ recognition force-fed to the world at large. We may agree or disagree with their choices but their choices have become a global marker in science, literature, and peace. They make the decision for the world. We have to live with it.

There are choices they have made that at the time they were made, they may in fact have made some sense - such as Barack Obama (and later you cringe at the very idea of it), and then there are choices they have made that make you reach for your pillow when you heard their name in association with Nobel Prize for the first time: the director of a poisonous gas factory Fritz Haber (1918 - chemistry), the inventor of lobotomy Antonio Egas Moniz (1949 - medicine), the war criminal Henry Kissinger (1973 - peace), or more recently the European Union (2012 - peace).

In the more recent years, however, it is the more egregious case of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese politician, who is now at a head of a state apparatus engaged in mass murder of Muslims that needs urgent attention.

 

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Aung San Suu Kyi does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com