Opinion

The icon who toppled herself

November 14, 2018

Like the once-admired statue of a Colossus, the edifice of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi is cracking and crumbling away. This is a woman who won international acclaim for her stubborn refusal to bow to the demands of a vicious military junta which kept her under house arrest for 15 years. This is a woman who demanded that her followers in her National League for Democracy mounted only peaceful protests against the military regime. This is a woman who came to rival South Africa’s Nelson Mandela as a beacon for democracy and human dignity. And this is the woman who, now in government, has stood by while Buddhist fanatics and her security forces have launched a campaign of genocide against her country’s Muslim minority, a campaign which has seen a million Rohingya driven into neighboring Bangladesh.

The honors once heaped upon her head by the international community are now being taken away one by one. In September, Canadian legislators voted to revoke Aung San Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship. Around the world, plaques celebrating her achievement have been torn down. The latest honor to be withdrawn is the Ambassador of Conscience award made to her by Amnesty International. This organization’s judgment has not always been right but in the case of the once revered Suu Kyi, it has been prepared to fess up that it got it seriously wrong.

Amnesty’s boss Kumi Naidoo told the Burmese leader he was profoundly dismayed that she no longer represented a symbol of hope and courage nor was an undying defender of human rights. He added that Suu Kyi’s denial of the gravity and scale of the atrocities being committed against the Rohingya meant there was little prospect of their tragedy coming to an end.

Indeed, the best that this woman has managed to admit, speaking at an economic conference this year in Vietnam, was that she could “perhaps” have handled the Rohingya crisis differently. But this confession came immediately after she had defended the jailing for seven years of two Reuters journalists who had exposed the cold-blooded murder by members of the Myanmar army of a group of Rohingyan detainees. She prattled on about the rule of law and the transparent decision of the court in finding these men guilty but added, almost certainly in recognition of the international impact this crushing of press freedom had had, that the two men would be able to appeal the verdict.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the highest accolade that this woman received, her 2009 Nobel Peace prize. At the time, no one imagined that Suu Kyi was dedicated to anything other than peace and justice. Becoming a Nobel Peace laureate cemented her reputation as an icon of decency and humanity. It was the plinth on which her shining worldwide reputation was built. In the earthquake of international disgust at the enormities perpetrated against her country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, crimes which she has done nothing to halt, the foundation of her fame as a peace-loving humanitarian has been shattered. By herself, she has toppled her once-towering statue. The Nobel committee should immediately seize back the Peace Laurels from her fallen head; otherwise in future this hugely prestigious award will count for absolutely nothing. Indeed, current holders of this accolade, such as President Barack Obama, may think of returning their own peace laurels.


November 14, 2018
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