By Dhaka Tribune Editorial

November 5, 2017

How can we answer to our conscience knowing full-well what the Myanmar military is doing to the innocent Rohingya minority -- not even sparing children or pregnant women?

Despite the on-going humanitarian crisis involving Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in their home state, Bangladesh continues to trade with the country responsible for it.

Myanmar’s ruthless persecution of the Rohingya has burdened an already overpopulated Bangladesh with around one million hungry and severely distressed refugees.

The government, while doing its best, is struggling to host and feed them, while also figuring out the plan for eventual repatriation with officials in Myanmar who are bent on making the process as difficult as possible.

The Myanmar military’s crimes against humanity have prompted international outrage and even some punitive action, such as the World Bank halting a $200 million development loan to the country.

And yet, sadly, Bangladesh continues to approve deals to import rice and fuel oil from our hostile neighbour.

It is understandable that Bangladesh needs to stock up on food, but do we really need Myanmar as a trading partner?

It should be a matter of principle that a nation should not trade with another that is directly involved in ethnic cleansing, and, further, a matter of dignity, because Myanmar has been trying to sully our name with false accusations.

How can we answer to our conscience knowing full-well what the Myanmar military is doing to the innocent Rohingya minority — not even sparing children or pregnant women?

To send the right message to Myanmar, we need a clear and decisive policy regarding our trade dealings with the country — this means putting a stop to all trade unless and until Myanmar ends its human rights abuses.

By The Editorial Board

The New York Times

November 3, 2017

“We all have to try our best to live peacefully,” Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who heads Myanmar’s civilian government, said Thursday on a visit to Rakhine State, from where more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh, escaping military repression so brutal that the United Nations calls it ethnic cleansing. The refugees have told harrowing tales of Myanmar forces setting villages on fire and massacring women and children, with hundreds of people killed.

Good-hearted people who once considered Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi a hero for resistance to the nation’s military government that earned her a Nobel Peace Prize, charitably interpret her failure to denounce genocide as a necessary accommodation to generals who still retain absolute control over security and the civil service. But to visit Rakhine State and say nothing about the crimes that occurred there is an act of complicity.

Her government has cynically offered to repatriate any Rohingya who can prove they lived in Rakhine State, knowing full well these people fled with little more than the clothes on their back, that many of their villages no longer exist and that there are no guarantees for their safety amid a hostile Buddhist population and a military that remains unchecked.

For the sake of Myanmar’s democracy, we must still hope that she can speak out, resist and be a force for justice. Meanwhile, the United States must keep the pressure on Myanmar’s military. A bipartisan proposal in the United States Senate would do that, by imposing targeted sanctions and visa bans against senior Burmese military officials and banning American military assistance to Myanmar until there is “significant progress” on human rights.

That progress must include guarantees that any Rohingya who wish can safely return to their homes in Myanmar and that aid groups can deliver assistance freely. There must also be an accounting for any crimes committed against civilians by the military.

That is the message that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson should deliver forcefully when he meets with senior leaders and officials in Myanmar on Nov. 15 to address the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine State.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the beneficiary of international moral outrage and support during those years when she was under house arrest, may be in denial about the horrors suffered by Myanmar’s Rohingya at the hands of the country’s military, but the military leaders must know that the world sees clearly what they have wrought and will not stand idly by.

By Editorial Board

The Washington Post

October 30, 2017

THE BIGGEST and most ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing the world has seen in years continues unabated in Burma. Since Aug. 25, more than 600,000 members of the Rohingya community have been driven across the border to Bangladesh by the Burmese military, which has systematically torched their homes and killed those who resisted. The United Nations says it expects most of the 500,000 remaining Rohingya in the Rakhine state to cross the border in the coming weeks; the military has pushed many of them into camps, to which aid groups and journalists are denied access.

This atrocity is being perpetrated against a despised minority: The Rohingya are Muslims who are regarded by Burma’s Buddhist majority as foreign interlopers, even though they have lived in the country for generations. Virtually no one in Burma, also known as Myanmar, has come to the victims’ defense — not even Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who controls the civilian government, if not the generals. A senior U.N. official, Yanghee Lee, pointed out last week that the country’s revered leader might be the only one who could counter the popular “hatred and hostility” against the Rohingya if she were to “reach out to the people and say, ‘Hey, let’s show some humanity.’ ” But Aung San Suu Kyi has remained silent.

After weeks of hesi­ta­tion, the United States has finally begun to act against this staggering crime. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Oct. 18 that “the world can’t just stand idly by and be witness to the atrocities,” adding that the military leadership would be held accountable. A few days later, the State Department followed up by pulling the waiver allowing current and former Burmese military officials to travel to the United States, and said military units involved would be deemed ineligible for U.S. aid. It called on the government to “facilitate the safe and voluntary return of those who have fled” and “address the root causes of systematic discrimination against the Rohingya.”

That, however, is not enough. So far State has not formally adopted the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe the forced exodus. Mr. Tillerson called Burma’s army chief on Thursday, but a statement issued afterward referred only to “reported atrocities.” In fact, as Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, has said, what is occurring is “genocide” — and the U.S. response should be proportionate.

Burma was something of a pet project for the Obama administration, which lavished attention on the regime and lifted long-standing sanctions after it held a democratic election. It’s now clear that those who questioned whether President Barack Obama acted prematurely in removing the remaining sanctions before leaving office were correct. President Trump, who seems to take a visceral pleasure in reversing Mr. Obama’s legacies, would be right to do so in this case. Senior Burmese military officials should be targeted with asset freezes, and all business with the military and its affiliates should be suspended.

Mr. Trump has yet to speak out about the assault on the Rohingya, though it is the most serious human rights crisis to occur so far in his presidency. His upcoming visit to Asia, during which he will attend a summit of Southeast Asian nations that includes Burma, provides him an opportunity to show he will not ignore crimes against humanity.

By Editorial Board

The Washington Post

August 18, 2017

IN FEBRUARY, the United Nations released a report detailing the Burmese government’s human rights abuses against the long-suffering Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state — abuses that likely amounted to crimes against humanity. Burma should have responded by allowing U.N. investigators into the country and creating accountability mechanisms to prevent further violations. Instead, a government inquiry has concluded that there is “no evidence of crimes” and that “people from abroad have fabricated news claiming genocide had occurred.” 

On the contrary, there is considerable evidence to suggest that systematic human rights violations have occurred in Rakhine. The Rohingya have long been denied citizenship and pushed into ghetto-like conditions. This persecution escalated last year, when Burmese security forces conducted a scorched-earth campaign in the state amid widespread reports of mass rape, torture, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings. The government has also restricted the movements of Rohingya people, imposing curfews and contributing to extreme food shortages. Nearly 90 people have died since the violence erupted last year, while an estimated 65,000 have fled Rakhine.

Burma’s response was to establish an investigative commission that lacked credibility from the outset. The 13-member committee was headed by former military leader and current Vice President Myint Swe and included no Rohingya representatives. According to reports from civil society, its investigators used sloppy research methods, browbeat villagers and ignored complaints.

The commission made a few common-sense recommendations. It rightly acknowledged that imposing restrictions on Rohingya and the media in Rakhine could create conditions for violence and extremism, and it suggested relaxing limitations on humanitarian assistance. Yet these proposals are overshadowed by the commission’s denial of any systematic wrongdoing. Along with new calls to expand security measures against Muslim insurgents and reports of a troop surge in Rakhine, this essentially gives the military the green light to continue using excessive force. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that Burma’s partially democratic government bears many similarities to its autocratic predecessor: It is overly sensitive to criticism, repressive toward minorities and willing to go to great lengths to protect the military. The international community should take note and renew calls to allow a U.N. fact-finding mission to visit the country. Congress should rethink the idea of expanding American military ties with Burma or, at the very least, consider imposing a vetting process and human rights benchmarks for any further military engagement. The United States has long championed democracy in Burma; the commission’s announcement proves this fight is not over yet.

By Statesman

July 19, 2017

In its editorial on July 18, the paper criticised Myanmar's State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, for failing to uphold the democratic principles she espoused when she took power.

NEW DELHI -- For all her democratic protestations of concern over the persecution of Rohingyas, the Myanmar government's refusal to allow a UN fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of killings, rape and torture by security forces against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state reflects poorly on the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi. Ironically enough, her stance is seemingly concordant with that of the junta's.

As the de facto leader of Myanmar's civilian government, short of President, and also its foreign minister, she has rejected the allegations and now opposes the mission that has been planned by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council. The flat refusal of the government in Naypidaw is in itself a mockery of human rights.

Sad to say, Suu Kyi is pretty helpless as she fears that she may have to pay a political price for speaking out. Contrived silence can have its costs, however. Having turned down the UN team's visit, she has in effect gone against the voice of the comity of nations.

The hope raised two years ago - at the time of transition from repressive military rule to a purportedly democratic regime - is in tatters. Indeed, her ability to achieve peace and rein in the junta is now open to question, more so with the official assertion that the country would refuse entry to the UN investigators.

Obviously, the world body would have exposed the almost relentless persecution that flies in the face of the certitudes of democracy that Suu Kyi had upheld not too long ago. She seems to be utterly helpless against the vicious crackdown on the Rohingyas by the Myanmarese army amid reports of mass arrests, the burning of villages, bar on journalists, aid workers, and international monitors.

The democratic change has made no difference to the pilght of the Rohingyas - they remain nowhere people on the border with Bangladesh, wandering from shore to shore in search of a home. The fact that some of them have fled to the Kashmir Valley in search of refuge might serve to exacerbate matters, given the inbuilt insecurity in that swathe of India.

The UN team's proposed visit can be contextualised with Amnesty International's indictment - "The army's callous and systematic campaign against the Rohingyas may be a crime against humanity". So indeed it is. The lifeline of the "nowhere men" in Rakhine has been severed; the military blockade has deprived them of food, water, and healthcare. Such brutality has served to undermine Suu Kyi's standing, after having led Myanmar since the party's resounding electoral triumph in 2015; not forgetting her famous victory in 1990, which led her to jail rather than the helm of the government.

The ethnic conflict does not speak well of her skills as a peacemaker.

Suu Kyi has failed to live up to her own rhetoric.

The Statesman is a member of The Straits Times media partner Asia News Network, an alliance of 22 news media entities.

By Carbonated.TV Editorial

July 3, 2017

If Myanmar has nothing to hide, why isn't the country's de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, allowing U.N. investigators to visit the country?

When Myanmar transitioned from military rule to civilian democracy, many hoped the new government would make efforts to resolve the Rohingya Muslim crisis that began in 2012.

Many believed the de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is a former Nobel Peace Prize winner, would fight for the rights of the ethnic Muslim community, which is considered an outcast in its own country, despite living there for centuries.

However, all hopes of peace were dashed after Suu Kyi, in the very first 100 days of her rule, banned the usage of the term "Rohingya" to appease Buddhist extremists, who wield considerable influence in Burmese politics.

Suu Kyi, a woman who spent nearly 15 years under house arrest for her human rights advocacy, made it very clear that she was not going to alienate the Buddhist majority for the sake of an unrecognized minority.

In fact, as per latest reports emerging from the region, she appears to be wholly complicit in the discrimination against Rohingya Muslims.

As minister of foreign affairs, Suu Kyi recently refused entry to members of a United Nations investigation focusing on widely reported allegations of killings, rape and torture by security forces against Rohingya Muslims.

“If they are going to send someone with regards to the fact-finding mission, then there’s no reason for us to let them come,” said Kyaw Zeya, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“Our missions worldwide are advised accordingly,” he added.

The U.N. mission was announced in the wake of the controversial military crackdown against Rohingya Muslims in October in the Rakhine State.

Scores have been killed while hundreds of others, around 75,000, have fled the country into neighboring countries for refuge in what human rights watchdogs believe is part of a systematic ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim community.

The Burmese army has also been accused of burning down Rohingya Muslim villages and raping the women belonging to the embattled group.

Despite numerous reports citing the aforementioned abuses against Rohingya Muslims, Suu Kyi remains reluctant to let U.N. investigators into the country, arguing it “would have created greater hostility between the different communities." (But does withholding information about the crisis help in resolving it? Of course not.)

If Myanmar has nothing to hide, why isn't Aung San Suu Kyi allowing U.N. investigators to visit the country?

By Saudi Gazette Editorial Board

June 18, 2017

The United Nations has removed its envoy from Myanmar in large measure because of her failure to address the dire human rights scandal of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

Renata Lok-Dessallien, a Canadian, has not been fired — like so many supranational organizations the UN rarely takes such a radical step preferring always to look after its own — but her five-year term has been ended after three and a half years and she has been sent on leave to be “rotated” to some other post where it must be hoped she can do less harm.

The new UN Secretary-General António Guterres acted after a damning report that found that Lok-Dessallien was too close to the Myanmar government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and she had preferred to focus the UN’s Myanmar mission’s development brief while ignoring controversial humanitarian issues of which the plight of the Rohingya is the most glaring. More conscientious members of her team protested with the result that the UN mission became fractured and, according to the private UN enquiry, “dysfunctional”.

Suu Kyi has thus lost an important level of cover for her failure to act positively to protect the interests of the Rohingya. And she has not improved her standing by refusing to accept a UN fact-finding mission, insisting that it would only inflame social tensions. In an interview given in Sweden she said that she was relying instead on the findings of a report which she herself commissioned from the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Among the interim findings of his Advisory Commission on Rakhine State published in March was a recommendation that the camps into which the Rohingya had been herded be closed down.

This has been adopted by Suu Kyi but instead of the process being run over five years as Annan proposed, the closures have already begun. This is interesting since the original excuse for setting up these camps was to protect the Muslims from their Buddhist neighbors. This was of course never true. The conditions in these camps were appalling and the luckless inhabitants continued to be brutalized and exploited by their military guards.

While Suu Kyi cries crocodile tears and blocks the formal UN investigation, the violence against Myanmar’s Muslims continues. Annan has called for those guilty of crimes against the Rohingya to be brought to justice but there is little sign that Suu Kyi has any intention of doing this. One of the extraordinary injustices has been that Myanmar’s courts have refused to hear cases brought by Rohingya on the grounds that they are not Myanmar’s citizens and therefore do not enjoy equal rights. It has been glaringly obvious for a long time that Suu Kyi could start to push back against the monk-led Buddhist bigots who have led the campaign of murder, rape and intimidation against the Rohingya, by recognizing that this community does indeed belong in Myanmar and ensuring that they have full citizenship.

In her early days in power, with the former military rulers still glowering from their barracks, Suu Kyi told the international community that she could not take the risk of making this important step. She is still trotting out this excuse. As a result her image is becoming ever more stained and tarnished. Unfortunately, by extension her seemingly willful failures besmirch all other Nobel Peace laureates.

By Saudi Gazette Editorial

May 22, 2017

More than a dozen Nobel Laureates have written an open letter to the UN Security Council warning that Rohingya Muslims are victims of genocide. But one Nobel Laureate, an international human rights idol, refuses to be moved by the plight of these people, despite dire warnings of a tragedy “amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” That Nobel Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, happens to be state counselor and de facto civilian leader of Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Suu Kyi will not even use the term Rohingya. Instead, she calls them either Muslims or Bengalis, thereby attempting to legitimize the false narrative that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

“Show me a country that does not have human rights issues,” Suu Kyi said at a press conference in October 2016, referring to reports of the miserable conditions under which Rohingya Muslims live.

This gives the impression that what the Rohingya face is some minor human rights issue that can be solved by the intervention of courts or government agencies, while what they facing is systematic persecution. The Rohingya, who form nearly two percent of Myanmar’s predominantly Buddhist population, are excluded from the official list of ethnic minorities and remain without citizenship and are denied freedom of movement, access to education, health care and the ownership of property. There are restrictions on their movement. Many of the more than one million Rohingya who were gradually denied citizenship and disenfranchised ahead of the 2015 election still do not have adequate identity papers.

On top of all this is the violence to which Rohingya Muslims are subjected from time to time. Violent campaigns in 1978 and in the early 1990s drove hundreds of thousands of people into Bangladesh. UN and human rights organizations have pointed out that such violence has all the hallmarks of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, as well as of the ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s western Darfur region and in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The religious violence that in 2012 hit Rakhine state, where a majority of Rohingya Muslims lives, was particularly brutal. More than 120,000 people had to leave their homes. They are still languishing in grim displacement camps. They are not allowed to leave the squalid encampments, where they live in piecemeal shelters with little access to food, education and healthcare.

Things took a turn for the worse after a group of Rohingya militants attacked police outposts in the north of Rakhine state in October 2016. Militants killed nine people setting off a military crackdown.

Of course, the Myanmar government has denied allegations that its soldiers committed rape and arson, but Amnesty International says atrocities committed by troops could amount to crimes against humanity. It is as though the security forces in Myanmar are using the killings of nine border guards as an excuse for a brutal crackdown, according to John McKissick, an official of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Meanwhile, some 70,000 Rohingyas have fled to makeshift camps. But this does not appear to be end of the story if you go by what officials in Myanmar say about the October attack. For example, a top leading official has compared the incident to Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America. The Rohingya have already suffered enough. The last thing they wish is to be treated as an enemy in Myanmar’s version of the “war on terror”. We have seen how in the post-9/11 era, some states at odds with their Muslim minority populations are using or misusing the threat of terrorism to mask their own oppressive treatment of minority groups. Human rights groups should be particularly alert to this danger.

By Editorial of Carbonated.TV

May 17, 2017

She is celebrated worldwide for her years of suffering at the hands of despots. So why is Aung San Suu Kyi allowing a genocide now that she is in charge?

Burma’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a celebrated human rights icon, but she is also an apologist for genocide ethnic cleansing and mass rape of Rohingya Muslims.

Suu Kyi is the de facto head of government, in Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the northern Rakhine state have been shot, stabbed, starved, robbed, raped and driven from their homes in the hundreds of thousands.

Some 1 million of these people live in apartheid-like conditions where they are denied access to employment, education and health care. They are thus forced to leave their homes and move to neighboring countries just to survive.

Suu Kyi, however, has adopted a cowardly stance on the issue where she is not only remaining silent but also is complicit in the atrocities taking place. She has clearly chosen the side of Buddhist nationalism and crude Islamophobia.

She has also clearly proved she’s an islamophobe when in a 2013 interview with BBC’s Mishal Husain, Aung San Suu Kyi complained, “No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim.”

The Intercept has rightly described Suu Kyi in a piece that reads: “‘Saints should always be judged guilty,’ wrote George Orwell, in his famous 1949 essay on Mahatma Gandhi, ‘until they are proved innocent.’ There is no evidence of innocence when it comes to Aung San Suu Kyi and her treatment of the Rohingya — only complicity and collusion in unspeakable crimes. This supposed saint is now an open sinner. The former political prisoner and democracy activist has turned into a genocide-denying, rape-excusing, Muslim-bashing Buddhist nationalist. Forget the house arrest and the Nobel Prize. This is how history will remember The Lady of Myanmar.”

By Editorial Board

Pittsburgh Post Gazette

March 31, 2017

A year ago, the political ice thawed in Myanmar, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi playing a larger role. There was some thought that life there, in particular its human rights record, might improve.

It turns out that rather than clean up the act of Myanmar’s long-ruling generals, Ms. Suu Kyi has come increasingly to serve as a more human front for the generals’ activities. The inter-ethnic and religious conflicts that have characterized the country’s history are continuing and perhaps growing even worse.

In particular, the conflict between the majority Buddhists of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, and the Muslim Rohingya minority has become sharper. Thousands of Rohingya, in the face of persecution, are fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh as refugees. The treatment of the Rohingya by the Myranmar government is coming to be called genocide by some international observers, staining deeply the reputation of Ms. Suu Kyi, who has yet to take a stand on their behalf.

The larger long-standing problem of Myanmar, population 55 million, is the continuing quest for autonomy, sometimes by military means, of 17 of its some 100 ethnic minorities. The country’s military continues to try to suppress these groups by force, prompting some to take up arms. Some claim that Ms. Suu Kyi has as yet showed no willingness to resolve the problems with them through negotiations.

It is possible to be kind and say that she is waiting to solidify her own position further, especially vis-a-vis the Myanmar military, before tackling knotty intra-Myanmar problems directly. It is also possible to suggest that, having been under detention for years for championing democracy, she does not want to risk her political resurrection and current position by taking on some of the basic problems of her country.

But Ms. Suu Kyi’s position toward the problem of Myanmar’s minorities, particularly the Rohingya, does not enhance her reputation for humanity or greatness. The daughter of an independence leader, she has showed indomitable courage in the face of government military coercion in past years. The people of the country and the world continue to expect a lot of her.