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A poster of Aung San Suu Kyi | Photo by theodore liasi / Alamy

By Maung Zarni and Matthew Gindin | Published by Tricycle on November 28, 2018

A former ally of Aung San Suu Kyi responds to the Tibetan Buddhist teacher’s support for Myanmar’s controversial leader.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, a well-known teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism, surprised some in the Buddhist world recently when he penned an open letter of support to Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of Myanmar’s civil government accused of complicity in the military’s persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority. The letter praises her sacrifice, courage, and principled political actions in pursuit of the rights of her people, while attacking her critics as hypocrites and arrogant colonialists pushing Western interests and values.

Dzongsar Khyentse is a major figure in contemporary Buddhism. A tulku (reincarnated master) in the Khyentse lineage, he is the son of the revered Thinley Norbu Rinpoche and grandson of the influential Dudjom Rinpoche. An embodiment of the Rime (nonsectarian) movement, he is the guardian of the teachings of the Dzogchen master Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, as well as an accomplished filmmaker and author of popular English language expositions of Buddhism. 

His support for Suu Kyi comes on the heels of a September report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar that said the violent campaign against the Rohingya amounts to genocide, a claim supported by several human rights research and documentation bodies around the world. The report, released at a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, stated that Suu Kyi and her civilian government had “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes” through their “acts and omissions.” As a result of mounting allegations of culpability, Suu Kyi, who was once lauded for her activism on behalf of democracy in Myanmar, has been stripped of multiple awards, including the US Holocaust Museum’s Elie Wiesel Award, her honorary Canadian citizenship, and Amnesty International’s human rights award.

In response to Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche’s letter, Maung Zarni, a Burmese Buddhist, pro-democracy activist, and former ally of Suu Kyi, and I have co-authored an open letter challenging what we view as faulty narratives, misinformation, and questionable reasoning in Dzongsar Khyentse’s letter. 

—Matthew Gindin

Dear Rinpoche,

In a November 16 letter, you expressed your “deep respect and appreciation” for all Suu Kyi has done “to fight for your people’s freedoms.” You call her a “true heroine of this age, more than worthy of the Nobel Prize and other honours” and say you are “appalled by the removal of awards” she received. You argue that this is a “blatant double standard,” citing the reception of a Nobel Prize by former US President Barack Obama despite his use of drone warfare against Middle Eastern civilians.

You see this double standard as part of “insidious colonialism strangling Asia and the world,” which you say teaches Asians to “disparage our own noble traditions and instead to treasure Western values and music, to chew gum and wear faded jeans, to embrace Facebook and Amazon, and to ape Western manners and institutions.” 

I (Zarni) am a child of a Burmese Buddhist family with close ties to the military. I grew up with intense pride and deep reverence for the Buddhist tradition and spiritual culture of Burma. After coming to the US to study, I founded the Free Burma Coalition to support the struggle for democracy in Burma and became a hardworking supporter of Suu Kyi, inspired by her personal courage and the mixed discourse of Buddhist loving-kindness and human rights. But early on I began to suspect that she was an ethnic nationalist and a Buddhist chauvinist, more concerned for her own legacy and the interests of the Bamar majority than she was for human rights and a true democracy for all the peoples of Myanmar. In April 2016, Suu Kyi assumed the position of State Counselor. She quickly morphed into a key actor in the longstanding oppression of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. Since then I have been a fierce critic of my fellow Buddhist dissident, who now acts in a joint partnership with our former common oppressor, Myanmar’s murderous military, the Tatmadaw.

According to statistics from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM) earlier this year, 898,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled violence in Myanmar currently live in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Of them, 686,000 have arrived since August 2017, when the government launched a coordinated military-led campaign of arson, murder, and sexual violence against their communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. This assault, according to human rights organization Fortify Rights, was deliberately prepared for months in advance by the Tatmadaw. Many Rohingya, faced with proposals over the last year to repatriate them to the country where for decades they faced systemic discrimination and the deliberate deprivation of basic human rights, have said that they would sooner die in Bangladesh.

Genocide is not simply incidents of mass killings; it is a long process of systematic, intentional destruction of a target group. Suu Kyi, as the leader of the ruling NLD party, controls several government ministries involved in such efforts against the Rohingya, but she has done nothing to protest or attempt to stop her country’s abuse of them. Meanwhile, she has repeatedly and publicly dismissed well-documented reports of the genocidal violence of the Tatmadaw—in one instance referring to systemic sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls as “fake rape.”

Rinpoche, you cite atrocities committed by Western governments past and present and accuse the modern West of hypocrisy for criticizing Suu Kyi. First, the criticisms of Suu Kyi do not only come from the West but also from people all over the world who oppose the kind of brutal oppression the Myanmar state has subjected the Rohingya to. Second, you erase the distinction between Western non-governmental bodies and activists on the one hand and Western governments on the other. By your logic, the Swedish Nobel committee, local bodies like the Oxford City Council, or Suu Kyi’s own alma mater (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford) cannot criticize human rights abuses if the governments of Britain or Sweden have ever committed atrocities (which of course they have). You lump together governments, private bodies, and activists under the simplistic rubric of “the West.” These kinds of generalizations can become fodder for muddled thinking and racism. After all, many of the Western activists and human rights organizations who have criticized Suu Kyi have also spoken out against the violations of Western countries, and continue to do so. They have also confronted the Chinese state for its persecution of Buddhists and embraced efforts to preserve traditional Asian culture and values, such as the Gross National Happiness initiative in Bhutan. 

A more sober assessment of global politics would recognize that all cultures have committed atrocities and that many have fallen into the temptations of militarism, racism, and colonialism. You present the “noble tradition” of the East as opposed to the ignoble tradition of the West despite the fact that “our East” has as many murderous and colonizing legacies as “their West.” This way of framing the Rohingya crisis and criticism of Suu Kyi does more to obscure the matters at stake than to clarify them. In setting off West against East, your letter focuses on a clash of civilizations instead of the real problem: a clash of values. The true battle is between those who embrace values of nonviolence, compassion, and justice—which the best traditions of both West and East argue for—and those who put first their race, the defense of their traditions, the accumulation of capital, or other divisive values.

While we sympathize with your criticisms of the hypocrisy, arrogance, and colonial legacy of many Western countries and share your concern for the way that the “capitalist system” is swallowing diverse global cultures, we balk at your emphasis on the Western nature of what is destructive in the world today. The problems we face—growing fascism, violent racism, nationalism, tremendous gaps of wealth between the rich and the poor, the destruction of our shared ecosystem and the destruction of both ethnic and zoological diversity—are now global problems exacerbated by the worldwide embrace of misguided policies that are often championed by those who hold power and wish to cling to it. The current conflict in Myanmar embodies this adoption of destructive policies, in which the fires of ethnic disputes have been stoked in order to consolidate power for the military and business elite.

Toward the end of your letter you say that “nothing I write here denies the suffering of the Rohingya people,” but you argue that instead of blaming Suu Kyi, the British “should be taking responsibility for bringing the Rohingyas from Bengal in the 19th and 20th centuries as cheap labour” and suggest that the UK should take in the Rohingya refugees themselves. 

Here you are referencing a false narrative, popular in Myanmar, that claims that the Rohingya are not a native ethnicity but rather Muslim Bengali laborers who never went home and who now want to undermine the Burmese Buddhist state. This ahistorical propaganda is used to justify discrimination and violence against them. Suu Kyi has signaled that she accepts this narrative with her refusal to use the name “Rohingya,” a title by which they refer to themselves and that reflects their centuries-old history in the country.

In fact, the Rohingyas’ presence in the region long predates both the arrival of British colonial rule in 1824 and the emergence of Myanmar as a nation-state in 1948; thousands of Rohingya have been living in the western Arakan Kingdom, now Rakhine state, since the 15th century. Aside from the fact that there were no national boundaries as such in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the pre-colonial societies of the time, demographic and geographic fluidity was the norm. Arakan, or Rakhine, the fertile coastal region of the Bay of Bengal, was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society until Bamar invaders arrived. Their forces destroyed the nearby kingdom in Mrauk-U and then expanded, annexing Arakan in 1785.

Although international attention has focused on the plight of the Rohingya, their persecution is only the most egregious symptom of the interethnic conflict that afflicts Burma, a violence fueled by the Bamar supremacism of the ruling government and the oppression it directs at the Shan, Kachin, Karen, Mon, and other historic peoples of Myanmar. Arguably, the idea of an ethnically pure nation-state is a product of the very colonialism you claim to decry. 

“For me,” you write to Suu Kyi toward the end of your letter, “you remain the heroine you truly are. And for many who dare not speak up but who secretly agree, you personify our own #MeToo movement.” 

The #MeToo movement arose because powerful persons used their positions to sexually harass and assault women (as well as some men) and then manipulated or threatened them into keeping quiet about it. If anyone in Myanmar personifies the #MeToo movement, it is the Rohingya women and girls whom the Tatmadaw has gang-raped and murdered. 

Suu Kyi has publicly stated that these rapes did not occur, making her an enabler of the kind of violence that the #MeToo movement arose to stop, not a victim of it. In this situation, it is Suu Kyi herself who is a powerful abuser aiding other powerful abusers. Moreover, we find your attempt to co-opt the #MeToo movement to be acutely disrespectful of both the Rohingya victims of sexual violence and of all the courageous women who stood up to say “me too” to call sexual abusers to account around the world.

After this quick reference to #MeToo, you then suggest it may be time to seek out “the Westerner’s weak spot” in that “they don’t dare criticize Muslims or Jews for fear of being called Islamophobic or anti-Semitic,” so “perhaps we need to coin new words for anti-Buddhist or anti-Asian bias to evoke their guilt.” Western countries are particularly sensitive to the Holocaust because so many of us were complicit in the deliberate, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews only 70-odd years ago. We are sensitive to Islamophobia both because of the recent warfare between Western governments and historically Islamic ones, and also because of real problems with violent Islamophobia in western countries, such as the mosque shooting in Canada in 2017. There is a great irony in your writing this at a time when the United States government has tried to impose a ban on Muslims entering the country and when heated anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric has been normalized.

To close, we would like to call attention to one voice that is almost totally silent in your letter: the Rohingya themselves. Though your letter is really aimed at “Western” critics of Suu Kyi, the chief resistance to the genocide, and the primary critics of Suu Kyi and the Myanmar state, are not Westerners; they are Rohingya activists like Nural Islam, Razia Sultana, Tun Khin, and Nay San Lwin, to name a few, as well as groups like The Free Rohingya Coalition and Arakan Rohingya National Organization. Many of these Rohingya have been fighting for the last four decades against their impoverishment and oppression at the hands of the Myanmar state, and no one was more pleased by the revocation of Suu Kyi’s awards for human rights activism than they.

While there is always room for criticizing specific policies of a specific Western country or institution, when you paint matters with as broad as a brush as your letter does, opportunities for grappling with injustices in the real world are replaced by harmful meta-narratives that, to our mind, simply stoke the fires of conflict and division. It would be more fruitful for those opposed to colonialism, racism, violence, and injustice around the world to work together rather than to close ranks against each other. Your claim that Western institutions are guilty of colonial violence, both gross and subtle, is true. So is the claim that the Myanmar state and Aung San Suu Kyi are guilty of genocidal violence. Instead of putting these truths in opposition to each other, why not join hands to fight against injustice everywhere? Why not recognize greed, hatred, and delusion wherever they rear their ugly heads and create an international coalition of generosity, love, and clarity? 

With goodwill,

Maung Zarni and Matthew Gindin

Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist and scholar. He is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and the founder of the Free Burma Coalition.
Matthew Gindin is a journalist and meditation teacher in Vancouver, British Columbia. A former monk in the Thai Forest tradition, he is the author of Everyone in Love: The Beautiful Theology of Rav Yehuda Ashlag.



An Open letter to Suu
From Aunty Riri Win

Dear Suu,

Our acquaintance started way back as far as the 60's. We got connected through Aunty Dora who  adored you like a daughter she never had. Zali went to school in Worcester and was invited to visit  her. He became a regular visitor at your home, a hospitality he appreciated because you provided him a home away from home. After you left Oxford, Zali went to see Aunty Dora several times before she died. At Aunty Dora's funeral service at Oxford we got to meet the Free Burma group, as well as Alexander, Kim and family. 

In addition to Zali you treated us like a family. I still cherish the memory when we celebrated Christmas at your home in Oxford when you served the traditional Christmas fruit cake your mother in law prepared. You looked lovely and sweet surrounded by your family. Upon parting Michael  mentioned in passing, “Uncle, we are not involved in the movement against Ne Win.” Neither did we  ask him to join us. He was aware that we were actively involved against the atrocities that the Ne Win regime unleashed that caused a lot of suffering and pain amongst the Burmese. In 1988, you  eventually came home to take care of your ailing mother and was swept in the upheaval of that time  when thousands of people rose up against the oppressive military regime. 

You were detained by the military for not less than 15 years for speaking up for justice and peace,  separated from Michael and the boys. Over and over again you were maligned as being influenced by foreign forces as you had married a “foreigner”, a dirty word to the xenophobic military regime. Even your brother became estranged from you. 

You were held incommunicado, Michael's contact with you was severely curtailed. I remember vividly how at one time Michael had to leave Rangoon because his visa had expired. He had no place to go and no funds to sustain himself. We arranged for him to stay at a safe place in Bangkok before he was allowed to go back to see you, even for a short tome. 

We often called upon Michael to inquire about your safety and health. I mentioned that the democratic movement should heed the demands of the various ethnic groups for more autonomy. Michael's answer was: “Aunty, right now the army must return to the barracks.”

In the United States and all over the world, pressure was borne upon the military regime to release you. Amnesty International made it a priority to have you unconditionally released. With thousands of US residents we organized rallies as well demonstrations in front of the Burmese Embassy, the White House, and lobbied Congressional representatives. Congressman Bill Richardson was allowed to see you in Rangoon. We prayed for you in churches throughout the US. Chapman College, Bucknell University, and American University were amongst those institutions that championed and honored your cause. 

In the meantime we kept close contact with Michael. We joined him at the Nobel Peace Prize Award in 1991. I shed tears when they played Johann Pachelbel's “Canon in D”. According to Michael you used to play that piece on the piano. At the the ceremony, Alexander stood tall and dignified when he made the acceptance speech. “Today,” he said,” the people in Burma could stand a bit taller....” Michael proudly said that Alexander wrote the speech himself, he was only sixteen then. 

You were very generous in donating the Nobel Prize reward to establish scholarships for Burmese students for their education abroad. Zali and your friends in England still keep the funds alive and the young people were grateful for your financial support. 

Your children suffered a lot, separated from you for many years because of the Burmese political upheaval which was beyond their control. One wonders how this separation affects them emotionally.  We admire your family's sacrifice for the sake of freedom, justice and peace for the Burmese people.

We had the chance to visit Michael several times at Oxford as well as in the United States. In the middle of his apartment was a big picture of you. We were stricken with sorrow when Michael suffered from prostate cancer. He was not allowed to see you for the last time. You stayed in Rangoon for fear that the regime would not allow you back. Michael died. Was it an ultimate sacrifice? The xenophobic military regime stated that you were not a true patriot since you were married to a foreigner, a dirty word for the xenophobic military regime. Did Michael take the ultimate sacrifice to forever eliminate this curse brought upon you by the regime? One only wondered why so many men survived the battle against prostate cancer, but not Michael. 

We met you clandestinely in Rangoon . I cried when I saw you and you chastised me for crying, “you have struggle so much and suffered for such a long time,” I said. You stoically said: “the longer the struggle the sooner it will end.” The Military Intelligence Service got hold of our meeting and the Burmese Ambassador in Washington DC told Uncle that no more visa would be issued to him. 

The next time we met in Rangoon you were already released and you were busy meeting dignitaries, foreign and domestic. You were kind enough to present us with a lacquer tray, “For a remembrance.” you said. We will treasure the gift. In exchange we brought you some chocolates, your favorite comfort food. We asked whether you feel safe now. “Yes,” you said, “ I am safe behind these tall walls. And I have my dog that Kim gave me. He is very protective.” 

How time has changed. Today you don't have to fear the military regime since you are part of it. You have become the Prima Donna of the military and oblivious to the suffering of the people; the Kachins that were slaughtered as well as the Rohingyas. You have declared the accusations of genocide of the Rohingyas as fake news. You stated that you are for law and order, obviously regardless of justice. 

The military stated that the Rohingyas are not Burmese but Bengalis who settled in Burma for a better life. Is this not unlike your forefathers who came from Central Asia/Mongolia to seek a better life in Burma; not unlike the Portuguese, the English and the Indians who seek a greener pasture. They make up for what we now call Burmese The denial of the genocide committed by the military is reinforced by your stance and statements in agreement of this atrocities. The Stockholm Syndrome apparently hits you when the victim eventually become part of the oppressor. Remember Patricia Hearst? She joined her kidnappers and robbed a bank. 

It is a shame that you disregard the Buddhist tenet of ahimsa, thou shall not kill. Instead, you support the narrow-minded Buddhists that consider killing Muslims not a sin. Do you not heed The Dalai Lama's pronouncement that Buddhist monks do not kill? Bishop Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Malala, as well as the Pope urged you to work against discrimination and justice. Yet you remain unmoved. 

Your esteemed father spent his life to establish the military for the good of the nation. On the other hand, the present military regime work for their personal coffers. They have plundered the nation's natural resources for their power and wealth while the rest of the nation suffers. 

Like so many observers, Uncle witnessed the suffering of the Rohingyas at Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh. They lost their homes and saw their family members killed by the military. There are factual accounts how the military used rape as a weapon of destruction. That is factual and that is the truth. 

You cannot be blind to the truth. Justice will prevail. The international institutions will bring “the perpetrators of crime against humanity, including murder, forcible transfer, deportation and persecution on political, racial or religious grounds” to justice. Remember Pol Pot in Cambodia? The Serb leaders in Kosovo? 

I fear for the destiny of Aung San Suu Kyi, the former icon of democracy. For being unmoved and unconcerned you are being complicit in the atrocities perpetrated by the military. Is Michael's sacrifice for nothing? Is the suffering of Alexander and Kim for naught? Will you be the Marie Antoinette of Burma? Stand up for law and order with justice and redeem yourself, Suu. 

Uncle and I are at the sunset of our life, God willing we will always strife for justice . As John Wesley said: 

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

Amen. 

Dr Jacques Leider in a strategic discussion with retired Myanmar Military Officers at the Ministry of Defence's Historical Museum on 7 and 8 Sept 2017 when Myanmar Troops were committing ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas on the ground

Please sign this petition: http://chn.ge/2EfJ7NV

Letter of Concern to Oxford University Press regarding Dr Jacques Leider and ORE Asian History Series 


5 February 2018 

We, the undersigned group of scholars and rights campaigners, are disturbed by the fact that OUP’s Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) Asian History series has commissioned Dr Jacques Leider, head of the Bangkok-based Ecole Française de l’ Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and a well-known advisor to the Myanmar military’s Armed Forces Historical Museum in Naypyidaw, to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya people in the forthcoming series: the ORE Asian History (under “Political”, see “Rohingya: Emergence and Vicissitudes of a Communal Muslim Identity in Myanmar (Jacques Leider), forthcoming Jan–Mar 2018”, found 03 February 2018 at: http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/page/forthcoming/). 

As you know, the Tatmadaw (the official name of the Myanmar armed forces) has been credibly accused of committing crimes under international law including crimes against humanity and even the crime of all crimes, genocide, against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya. 

As you also know, the Oxford University Press (OUP) has a very well-earned reputation for fairness and authority in the fields in which they publish reference material. Anything published by OUP online about the Rohingya and Myanmar will be given a great deal of credibility by both scholars and the general public and carry a great deal of weight in any ongoing disputes over the exact legal name of the crimes against this world’s largest stateless population whose group identity and historical presence is being erased officially and popularly in Myanmar. 

We therefore draw your attention to our following concerns regarding your selection of Dr Jacques Leider to write a reference article for the ORE Asian History series: 

(1) We find that positions taken by Dr Leider in interviews with the press, in public talks and in published articles raise serious questions about his objectivity regarding the Rohingya and their history. His well-documented pattern of denials that the Myanmar military-directed mass violence and scorched-earth military operations against the Rohingya community – the subject of his ORE article – is challenged by the growing body of legal analyses and human rights research reports which point to the fact that Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya as a group amounts to international crimes including crimes against humanity and genocide. 

(2) We believe that televised appearances by Dr Leider with military and government officials condoning state policies against the Rohingya give the appearance to the viewing public that he validates views that underlie the Myanmar military's ousting in 2017 of 680,000 people and the massacre of Rohingya for which the military has recently admitted responsibility. A recent English-Burmese bilingual book entitled “Talk on Rakhine Issue: Discussion on Finding Solutions” published by the Ministry of Defence’s Myawaddy News Group in Myanmar highlights the fact, in photos and text, that Dr Leider was the only foreign expert to participate in the strategic discussion organized by this official propaganda organ of the Myanmar MOD in the first month of what the United Nations officially described as “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya. On 7 and 8 September 2017, Dr Leider was on stage seated with two ex-Lt-Colonels named Than Aye and Ko Ko Hlaing (respectively, ex-officer-in-charge of the strategic affairs unit and the ex-adviser to the former General and former President Thein Sein 2010-15) in the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw at the said invitation-only event billed as “Talk on Rakhine Issue: Discussion on Finding Solutions”. 

In the introduction of the aforementioned book published by the Myanmar Military, the position of Myanmar regarding the actions taken against the Rohingya – which have been abundantly documented and assessed as egregious human rights violations by six successive UN Special Rapporteurs on the human rights situation in Myanmar since 1992 as well as by the world’s leading human rights monitors such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – is presented as a legitimate course of action (that is, by the Myanmar military to defend the country against Islam’s attempt to expand its demographic power base and dominate the world; see supra at p. 4 “Talk on Rakhine Issues”, Ministry of Defence Myawaddy News Group). 

In these strategic discussions, ex-Colonel Ko Ko Hlaing openly singled out Oxford University as a very influential institution which hosted an international conference on the Rohingya where knowledge about the Rohingya (history, identity and repression) was discussed and disseminated. By this, he implied that Oxford University – and other similarly influential entities – is somewhere that the Myanmar military needs to try to make strategic inroads to promote its official denial both of Rohingya identity and history, and of the state-directed terror and expulsion. 

The audience was mainly composed of officials from the Ministry of Defence. Myanmar’s official and popular Islamophobia – whereby Muslims have been scapegoated in the same way as the Jews were in the old Europe – is well-documented in scholarly and human rights literature. These discussions took place at the time Leider’s host organization (the Myanmar military) was responsible for the violent deaths of “at least 6,700 Rohingya, in the most conservative estimations […] including at least 730 children below the age of five years,” in the first month alone of the military operations conducted in Northern Rakhine state of Myanmar (i.e. from 25 August to 24 September 2017), according to the findings from a limited survey carried out by the international humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) among the survivors of this wave of ethnic cleansing who are now in refugee camps in Chittagong, Bangladesh (see “Myanmar/Bangladesh: MSF surveys estimate that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed during the attacks in Myanmar” http://www.msf.org/en/article/myanmarbangladesh-msf-surveys-estimate-least-6700-rohingya-were-killed-during-attacks ). 


(3) Dr Leider’s insistence (see “History Behind Rakhine State Conflict” https://www.irrawaddy.com/from-the-archive/history-behind-rakhine-state-conflict.html, “The Frictions in the Rakhine State Are Less About Islamophobia Than Rohingya-Phobia” https://thewire.in/182611/frictions-rakhine-state-less-islamophobia-rohingya-phobia/ , and “The Truth About Myanmar’s Rohingya Issue” https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/the-truth-about-myanmars-rohingya-issue/ ) that Rohingya identity – not Rakhine or the majority Burmese – be critically scrutinized as a political identity born out of political and communal conflict indicates a bias against Rohingya claims of their long documented history of settled existence in Rakhine state. This pronounced bias (in addition to his evident relations with the Myanmar military) should have raised doubts about his appropriateness to write a reference article about the Rohingya. We perceive in Dr Leider’s writings and public statements an unconcealed bias against Muslim Rohingyas, which results in his dismissal or wilful ignorance of irrefutable (and easily accessible) evidence that effectively undermines his thesis which is that the Rohingya, unlike other “genuinely ethnic identities”, were manufactured by Muslim fighters or Mujahideens in the post-independence period of the 1950’s. For instance, Dr Leider labels it a “delusion” that the Government of the Union of Burma recognized the Rohingya as a constitutive ethnic group of the Union following the surrender of the separatist Mujahideen in July 1961. The irrefutable fact is this: as late as 1964, the Government of Burma officially included the Rohingya as an ethnic group of Burma in its official Burmese language “Encyclopaedia Myanmar” (V. 9). In addition, the Rohingya were granted a slot on the country’s sole broadcasting station known as the Burma Broadcasting Service (BBS) as an indigenous language programme, broadcast three times per week, alongside other indigenous languages such as Shan, Lahu, etc., until the 3rd year (1964) of the military rule of General Ne Win. 

The readily accessible official documentation supports the Rohingya’s collective claim that they were officially recognized as an ethnic group of the Union of Burma, from which follows the conclusion that it is the State of Myanmar that has embarked on the project of erasing Rohingya ethnic identity, their history and presence which predates the formation of the post-colonial state of the Union of Burma in 1948. Dr Leider’s choice to ignore these primary and official sources regarding Rohingya ethnic identity and nationality further reinforces Myanmar’s institutionalized propaganda and Fake News that the Rohingya do not exist as an ethnic nationality, while lending a veneer of objective scholarly authority. We observe, further, that there is an alarming parallel between Myanmar’s de-nationalization and identity destruction and the German de-nationalization of the Jewish population under Nazi rule. 

(4) Genocide denial is a crime in countries such as Germany. Although there is no UK or international law against which the denial of state-directed crimes against humanity, including genocide, of the Rohingya can be judged, the consensus is emerging among the world’s leading institutions and scholars in the field of genocide studies – from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yale University Human Rights Law Clinic, the University of Washington Law School, the Queen Mary University of London International State Crimes Initiative to the Russell-Sartre-inspired Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar – that Myanmar is responsible for genocide. Even the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressly stated that he is “not ruling out” that genocide is being committed against the Rohingya. Yet, despite the well-publicized findings by world-renowned research institutes and scholars of genocide, Dr Leider dismisses them. He also fails to acknowledge that Myanmar’s majoritarian racism among the country’s Buddhists is violent. He characterises Buddhist racism towards the Rohingya as merely “strong sentiment”. 

We do not deny that Dr Leider, like anyone else, has a right to comment on the Rohingya or any other topic, but when someone takes such a strong position against the historicity of one group's claims regarding ethnicity/identity (and only one group's in a context of conflict between two or more groups), it seems unfair that they should be commissioned for a project to write an article on the ethnic group in question that seeks to present itself as a fair and unbiased reference source. The ORE is certainly not an appropriate vehicle in which to publish such views. Indeed, OUP should have nothing to do with them. 

We note also that OUP appears only to have commissioned an article on the Rohingya and not on the Rakhine Buddhist community whose ethnic claims, we understand, are no stronger than those of the Rohingya. It is hard to interpret this as other than OUP’s taking a stand in favour of the Myanmar military and against the Rohingya for reasons unclear and that OUP supports, at least indirectly, the current ethnic cleansing which Dr Leider's writings and media appearances are used to deny. 

Finally, it needs to be stressed that there is something more consequential than our objection per se to OUP’s commissioning a reference article by Dr Leider on the target of the Myanmar military's repression. That is the question whether Western educational institutions of worldwide influence should allow themselves, wittingly or not, to be used as a platform by illiberal regimes through academics and scholars whom the regimes view as supporters of their views (and hence as, in effect, their proxies for propaganda). The well-reported cases of Cambridge University Press and China, or the LSE and the Ghaddafi regime, spring to mind. 

It is worth quoting the recent words of Ruth Barnett, a Jewish Kindertransport survivor in Britain: 

“‘Never Again’ is unlikely to be achieved in our lifetime but it is we who need to make an effective input towards making it happen. Each and every one of us can do something. It is essential to learn to contain our own violent impulses so that we can talk and negotiate instead of exacerbating and increasing the violence of others. 

“Perhaps the most poisonous factor is the toleration and cover-up of denial. Denial opens the door for others to commit crimes against humanity, as we clearly see others getting away with it. We need to enthuse and stimulate curiosity and an insistence to expose the truth. 

“We live with so much denial that many people can no longer distinguish between misinformation, disinformation and truth." 

(Ruth Barnett, 27 January 2018, "I Survived The Holocaust. Merely Remembering It Is No Longer Good Enough", RightsInfo.org, 


We sincerely urge OUP to reconsider your editorial decision to commission Dr Leider to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya. We ask that if this article goes ahead, it includes a clear disclaimer that Dr Leider is not a distant observer and that the article should be considered as an opinion piece, not as an unbiased reference source, regarding a controversial subject which has already been documented by MSF to have caused the deaths of over 6,700 Rohingya in the first month of Myanmar’s 2017 military attack and the flight of 680,000 refugees over several months. 


1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA 

2. Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, National Coordinator of Indonesia Legal Aid Association for Women, Indonesia 

3. Rainer Schulze, Professor Emeritus of Modern European History, University of Essex, and Founding Editor of the journal “The Holocaust in History and Memory,” UK 

4. Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher and activist (Institute Professor, MIT), USA 

5. Mofidul Hoque, author and activist, Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh 

6. Tapan Bose, filmmaker, human rights defender, India 

7. Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University, USA 

8. Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE Emerita Professor and Founding Director of The Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford 1982–1996, UK 

9. Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, UK 

10. Ritu Dewan, Vice President, Indian Society of Labour Economics; Director Centre for Development Research and Action; Executive Director, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism; President, Indian Association for Women's Studies (2014-17) 

11. Prof. Gregory Stanton, Founding Chairman, Genocide Watch & George Mason University. Arlington, Virginia, USA 

12. Johan Galtung, Founder, Peace Studies 

13. Youk Chhang, Chairman, Genocide Documentation Center of Camboda/The Sleuk Rith Institute, Cambodia 

14. Abdul Malik Mujahid, Chair Emeritus Parliament of the World's Religions 

15. Karen Jungblut, Director of Global Initiatives, USC Shoah Foundation, USA 

16. María do Mar Castro Varela, Professor of Pedagogy and Social Work and activist, Alice Salomon University, Berlin, Germany 

17. C Abrar, Professor of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh 

18. John H. Weiss, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University, USA 

19. Khin Mai Aung, Burmese American civil rights lawyer and writer, New York, USA 

20. Maung Zarni, Burmese human rights activist and scholar, Genocide Documentation Center of Cambodia/The Sleuk Rith Institute 

21. Harn Yawnghwe, Executive Director, Associates to Develop Democratic Burma Inc./Euro-Burma Office, Canada 

22. Bilal Raschid, Past President of Burmese Muslim Association 

23. Swagato Sarkar, DPhil (Oxford), Associate Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University, India 

24. Sumeet Mhaskar, DPhil (Oxford), O.P. Jindal Global University, India 

25. Prof. Donesh Mohan, Academic, India 

26. Dr. Peggy Mohan, Author, India 

27. Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Academic, India 

28. Rita Manchanda, Feminist writer, India 

29. Samsul Islam, Author, India 

30. Neelima Sharma, Theatre activist, India 

31. Jawed Naqvi, journalist, India 

32. Seema Mustafa, journalist, India 

33. Ashok Agrwaal, lawyer, India 

34. Dr. Walid Salem, Al Quds University & the Director of The Centre for Democracy and Community Development, East Jerusalem, Palestine 

35. Jun Nishikawa, PhD, professor emeritus, Waseda University, Japan 

36. Dr Ravi P Bhatia, an educationist and peace researcher & Retired professor, Delhi University, India 

37. Gill H. boehringer, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie University School of Law, Sydney , Australia 

38. Paul Copeland, C M, (Recipient, Order of Canada), Lawyer, Toronto, Canada 

39. U Kyaw Win, Professor Emeritus, Orange Coast College, California, USA 

40. Professor Michael W. Charney, Academic, UK 

41. Dr Amit Upadhyay, Assistant professor, TISS Hyderabad, India 

42. Dr. Nicola Suyin Pocock, United Nations University International Institute of Global Health, Malaysia 

43. Rezaur Rahman Lenin,Academic Activist, Adjuct Faculty, Eastern University Bangladesh & Executive Director, Law Life Culture, Bangladesh 

44. Natalie Brinham, ESRC PhD scholar, Queen Mary University of London School of Law, UK 

45. Niranjan Sahoo, PhD, Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, India 

46. Prof. Dr. Célestin Tagou, Prof. of PS, IR P&D Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations, Protestant University of Central Africa, Executive Secretariat of the Network of Protestant Universities of Africa

47. Dr. Tilman Evers, Germany 

48. Jørgen Johansen, Deputy Editor of Journal of Resistance Studies, Sweden 

49. Sarah Tobias, philanthropist & activist, Canada 

50. Miki Lanza, Movimento Nonviolento c/o Centro Studi Sereno Regis, Torino, Italy 

51. Oskar Butcher, human rights activist and scholar, Germany 

52. Professor Emeritus George Kent, University of Hawai'i and Deputy Editor, World Nutrition, USA 

53. Sebastian Eck, Galtung-Institut, Switzerland 

54. Robert J. Burrowes Ph.D., co-founder 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World', Australia 

55. Shadi Sadr, Executive Director of Justice for Iran, UK 

56. Tasnim Nazeer, Award-winning journalist and Universal Peace Federation Ambassador for Peace, UK 

57. Emir Ramic, Academic, Ph.D., Chairman of the Institute for Research of Genocide, Canada 

58. Nadeem Haque, P.Eng. - Director of the Institute of Higher Reasoning (IHR), Canada 

59. Diana de la Rúa Eugenio, President of Asociación Respuesta para la Paz -ARP-, member NGO of OAS, President of International Peace Research Association Foundation -IPRA Foundation, Argentina 

60. Dr. Syeda Hamid, Academic and Author, India 

61. Dr. Siddiq Wahid, Historian and Educationist, India 

62. Dr. Syed Ahmed Haroon, Psychiatrist, Pakistan 

63. Anis Haroon, Poet, Pakistan 

64. Sushil Pyakurel, Adviser to President of Nepal 

65. Porf. Noor Ahmad Baba, Academic, India 

66. Anand Patwardhan, Filmmaker, India 

67. Rodolphe Prom, President, Destination Justice, Cambodia 

68. Doreen Chen, Co-Director, Destination Justice, Cambodia 

69. Syed Zainul Abedin, Painter, Poet, Journalist, Bangladesh 

70. Dr. Navsharan Singh, Researcher and author, India 

71. Leo fernandez, IT Specialist, India 

72. Feroz Medhi, Filmmaker social activist, Canada 

73. John Packer, Associate Professor of Law and Director, Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, Canada 

74. Fathima, MA Women's Studies Student, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India 

75. Rana Jawad, University of Bath, UK 

76. Prof. Dr. Sami A. Al-Arian Director and Public Affairs Professor, Center for Islam and Global Affairs Ä°slam ve Küresel Ä°liÅŸkiler Merkezi, Turkey 

77. Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London, UK 

78. Karen Busby, Professor of Law & Director, Centre for Human Rights Research, University of Manitoba 

79. Lyal S. Sunga, Visiting Professor in International Relations and Global Politics, The American University of Rome, Italy 

80. Dr. Christina Szurlej, Assistant Professor, St. Thomas University (Canada) 

81. Matthew Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Fortify Rights



Dublin City Council
Civic Office
Wood Quay
Dublin 8

November 30, 2017

Dear Councillors,

The Rohingya community from Ireland is writing to your honourable offices on the issue surrounding the ‘Freedom of the City of Dublin’ bestowed on Aung San Suu Kyi.

In May 2009, a small number of the Rohingya community was resettled in Ireland by the government of Ireland. We came from two refugee camps in Bangladesh where most of the members of the community spent over 17 years. We fled from the 1991 ethnic cleansing campaign named “Operation Clean Nation” under the former military junta. We have now resettled in Ireland and are happy to call Ireland our home. We feel part of both the Rohingya community and the Irish community where ourselves and our children are working to become part of Irish society. We are working in our communities with volunteers, neighbours, local schools and colleges and governmental and non-governmental organizations for further integration in Irish society while also remembering where we came from, our identity and the family and friends that we left behind.

We share in the values of Irish society, a belief in freedom, solidarity, the protection of human rights, fairness, social justice and equality, all of the values which Irish society as a whole represents and of course, Dublin City Council. 

Ireland has had a long history of protection of human rights and for acknowledging individuals and groups who work towards social justice. Our community joined hundreds of Dubliners and human rights activists across the country on June 18, 2012 to give Aung San Suu Kyi a ‘céad míle fáilte’ in Dublin city when she was handed one of the most prestigious freedom award for her time under the house-arrest and for her outspoken words against the military regime at that time. On accepting the award, Aung San Suu Kyi said “This will be one of the unforgettable days of my life. I’ve been welcomed to Ireland as though I belong to you and thank you with all my heart. To receive this award is to remind me that 24 years ago, I took on duties from which I have never been relieved”. 

In her acceptance speech, she made promises to the Burmese people and gave a special mention to the Rohingya community in front of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.

However, since entering politics and forming her government after the landslide victory in 2015, she has rescinded on her promises. Not only that, she had now become the perpetrator of horrendous abuses directed at the Rohingya people. When questioned about the human rights abuses in Myanmar she claims that she is now a politician and not a human rights defender.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s systematic persecution and clearance operations of the Rohingya is clearly a form of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’. Many countries including the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom called the recent atrocities “the most profound human rights tragedies on the 21st century”. The United Nations labelled “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. International experts on genocide coined it “the slow-burning genocide” entering into its final stages, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum and many other organizations found “strong-evidence of genocide” against Rohingya. The evidence is clear in terms of the atrocities and human rights abuses against the Rohingya.

Furthermore, more than 877,000 Rohingya have been expelled from their birthplace since she became a politician in 2012, and over 712,000 (1.35-times the population of Dublin City) since she became the State-counsellor of Burma in April 2016. More than 625,000 of our people found refuge in the neighbouring Bangladesh since August 25th 2017 after fleeing the campaign of genocide in the country governed by her government. 

Mairead Maguire, the Irish Nobel Peace Laureate said, “It is morally wrong to treat Rohingya as non-citizens on their own lands. The plight of Rohingya in Myanmar (Burma) has worsened since 2012. Right now, they have two equally risky options; to stay and die in Myanmar or leave by boat.”

Seven fellow Nobel Peace Laureates warned Aung San Suu Kyi in May 2015 that “What Rohingya are facing is a textbook case of genocide in which an entire indigenous community is being systematically wipe out by the Burmese government.”

Despite the repeated calls from human rights groups and individuals, and the strong evidence of the atrocities, Aung San Suu Kyi remains silent and defends the military which is known for its heinous crimes and human rights abuses over the past 50 years. She is in denial and refuses to acknowledge what is happening saying “no, no, it is not ethnic cleaning” and “ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening”.

Aung San Suu Kyi has become complicit in the actions by the Burmese military and refuses to acknowledge and condemn the military operations of genocide. As mentioned, she has been condemned internationally but continues to guard the military and refuses to instigate any slowing down of the atrocities. 

Buddhist nationalism and the actions of the Burmese government is a blatant attack on our community and is an example of acute Islamophobia where the Rohingya people are being persecuted despite international condemnation. It is not only the Rohingya community that are suffering but all other religious minorities. As a sitting member of parliament, she has neither attempted to protest against four “Race and Religion Protection Laws” adopted at the end of military-backed government. Nor has she any concerns as the State-counsellor in promoting divisive and inflammatory comments from Thura Aung Ko, the minister of religious affairs. She had failed to condemn members of her cabinet whom have labelled all Muslims living in Burma as “associate citizens”. In other words, we are simply second-class citizens. 

Aung San Suu Kyi has called for the history of Burma to be rewritten which sets out to completely erase the residue of the existence of the “Rohingya” in the country’s historical documentations issued by the former democratically elected governments prior to General Ne Win’s coup d'état in March 1962.

Aung San Suu Kyi has also appointed ex-major Zaw Htay, one of the most racists and culprits in the incitement of hatred and violence against Rohingya which erupted the 2012 campaign of genocide, as the Director-general of her State-counsellor’s Office. He has served as former President Thein Sein’s spokesperson, and remains as the main source of misinformation and propaganda which is constantly fed to her.

For her Minster of Information, she has picked Pe Myint, a Rakhine nationalist who is responsible in the assertion of widespread fake, biased, unethical and anti-Rohingya propaganda. Through the ministry she has instructed the entire Burmese media outlets to use “terrorist” whenever covering the situations of “Bengali” – the term her official Facebook Page “Information Committee” often uses to refer to the Rohingya.

Thaung Tun, a military junta-era diplomat who once warned Aung San Suu Kyi “must not rock the boat” after her NLD (National League for Democracy) Party boycotted the junta’s constitution convention, is appointed in the new National Security Advisor post to defend her government like he had done for the junta on the international platform. 

Aung San Suu Kyi has also dispatched a group of diplomats or High Commissioners across the world who have mastered in victim-blaming, pointing the finger at insurgents in Burma. The letter that Lord Mayor of Dublin Micheál Mac Donncha received on September 11, 2017 from Burmese Ambassador in UK Kyaw Zwar Minn, in response to the Freedom of the City of Dublin award is a classic example of propaganda filled with anti-Rohingya rhetoric and outright lies. Below is an extract from the letter.

“It should be noted that, our security forces are fighting the extremist terrorists to safeguard Myanmar’s sovereignty. Terrorism today has become a global problem and it is a menace to the civilized world. Terrorism incidents in any part of the world, whether in Myanmar or in any other country should be treated the same as dangerous and dealt with accordingly.”

The letter further states that “terrorists and their lobbyists are working together to wrongfully portray Myanmar’s image by making up stories to incite anger and promote misunderstandings…… Accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide are totally false”. When the Irish government funded, Irish Centre for Human Rights’ published their report “Crimes against Humanity in Western Burma: The Situation of the Rohingyas”, documented the systematic persecution and the policies of discrimination implemented by the military. It gave particular attention to the 1982 Citizenship Law which is the foundation of all the persecution and discrimination – stripping of citizenship, denying freedom of religion, movement, marriage, education, healthcare, livelihood, etc.., and subjected to torture, arbitrary arrest, forced-disappearance, rape and sexual violence, forced labour, taxation and land confiscation.

It is also mentioned in the letter that Aung San Suu Kyi’s government supports the recommendations of Kofi Annan’s Commission, and the commission according to her spokesperson Zaw Htay, serves “as a shield” against “accusation from the international community”.

The tone and rhetoric of the letter highlights Aung San Suu Kyi’s Islamophobiac view. It gives the green-light to the military to collectively punish the entire community under the name of counter-terrorism campaign. Further atrocities occurred following the August clash with Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) who were forced to defend themselves by taking sticks, machetes and stolen arms to fight against the over 4-decade of institutionalised persecution and systematic campaign of slow-genocide. 

Kofi Annan’s commission had made recommendations, among them is providing citizenship to Rohingya. However, as the letter reads, the government supports “Citizenship verification pilot projects” which “the Muslim community leaders asked their people not to cooperate”. The pilot project is entirely a campaign to undermine the ethnic identity of Rohingya and to forcefully issue cards known as National Verification Cards (NVCs) to Rohingya civilians under the name of “Bengali” – the term seen by Rohingya as the cultural genocide or forced ethnic-reclassification. Her government along with the security forces have launched the smear campaign threatening the remaining Rohingya civilian to hold the cards or face mass-starvation through preventing farming, fishing and livelihood, and/or expulsion from the country.

Aung San Suu Kyi has clearly instructed the European Union, the United State of America, other countries and agencies to refrain from using the word “Rohingya”. The commission report has also briefly highlighted that she has requested to avoid using ‘Rohingya’. As the first female de factor leader, she has forgotten or ignored the widespread use of the term by Burma’s statesmen following the country’s Independence.

The first elected Prime Minister of Burma U NU told the nation on September 25, 1954, “The people living in northern Arakan (now Rakhine State) are our national brethren. They are called Rohingyas. They are on the same par in the status of nationality with Kachin, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan… They are one ethnic people living within the Union of Burma.” And so did the second Prime Minister of Burma U Ba Swe on November 4, 1959, “The Rohingya has equal status of nationality with Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan.”

Furthermore, “Rohingya leaders asked us not to call the Rohingya ‘Khaw Taw’, nor ‘Bengali’, nor ‘Chittagonian Kalar, nor ‘Rakhine Muslims’. Instead the Rohingya leaders said their self-referential ethnic name was the Arabic word Rohingya,” Vice Chief of Staff of Burma Armed Forced Brigadier Aung Gyi proclaimed on November 15, 1951.

Now Aung San Suu Kyi denies the right to self-identification of Rohingya community, and at the same time, has instructed to use “Muslims” or “the Muslim community in Rakhine”. On many occasions, she has refused to talk with diplomats who used “Rohingya” or told foreign delegates to refrain using “Rohingya”.

In her much-anticipated speech delivered on September 19, she used “Rohingya” once when associating Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s actions with “acts of terrorism”. “A new FM radio channel has been set up… broadcasts in Rakhine, Bengali and Myanmar languages,” described the choice of “Bengali” language for Rohingya during the speech.

She also lied that “All people living in the Rakhine State have access to education and healthcare services without discrimination” when there is absolutely no tertiary education nor primary healthcare services – there was only 1 doctor for 140,000 Rohingya compare to 1 for 681 Rakhine prior to the ongoing genocidal campaign which leaves no Rohingya doctors in Northern Rakhine State.

After the mounting criticism of not setting foot on Rakhine State, she visited the state on November 2. She was accompanied by a number of previously U.S. blacklisted military cronies and tycoons to survey for potential international investment on the Rohingya lands, which, according to her Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Minister Win Myat Aye, are the government properties. She visited just 2 of over 300 Rohingya villages completely destroyed under her watch since August 25, and met the military-handpicked Rohingya who cannot speak the Burmese language to portray Rohingya in the local media as “illegal Bengali” who don’t speak the national language. Before she left for capital Naypyidaw, she told the communities not “to quarrel” and “praise the security forces” for following “the Code of Conduct” that she reportedly instructed to adhere, told during her September Speech.

To further avoid or divert international condemnation and prosecution for her complicity in the genocide, she reached an agreement with Bangladesh on November 23 to repatriate the Rohingya refugees without providing the citizenship, the security, the international observers and the resettlement to their places of origin. Instead, her government proposed to build temporary camps, similar to Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps in Sittwe and other townships of Rakhine State where more than 120,000 Rohingya are still confined without basic movement, education, healthcare, livelihood since 2012. According to the government, the temporary camps are to host the refugees until they are being resettled back to their villages which seems extremely suspicious due to the calls from various nationalist groups including Buddhist monks and her own party members to permanently segregate the entire population by means of camps and heavily-guarded ghettos.

On November 27, Oxford, the city where she has pursued her education, the place where she has met her late husband Michael Aris and the home where her two sons Alexander Aris and Kim Aris, were raised, stripped her of “Freedom of Oxford” bestowed in 1997, for “her inaction in the face of oppression of the minority Rohingya population… denial of any ethnic cleansing and dismissal of numerous sexual violence against Rohingya women as ‘fake rape’”.

In a similar action of protest, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University where she obtained B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1968, has pull down her portrait from its entrance and removed her name from its common room. The London School of Economics, cities of Sheffield and Glasgow and the Canadian trade union Unifor, are some of the growing list of cities, institutions and agencies which feel compelled to withdraw their honours for her lack of values, integrity and moral responsibilities.

She becomes a leader, more precisely political leader who doesn’t want to compromise for the power which corrupts her absolutely.

The abject cowardice she has shown to stand up against the world’s most persecuted people, the moral failure she has demonstrated to condemn the atrocious actions of military, and the vicious denial she has forged to label the well-documented crimes against humanity as “fake” including rape – which she bravely said on May 23, 2011, “Rape is rife. Rape is used in my country as a weapon by Armed Forces against those who only want to assert the basic human rights”, all invariably indicate the downfall of once-considered the Beacon of Hope or the Champion of Freedom.

When the members of Rohingya community visited the Mansion House in the heart of city on September 19, the Lord Mayor of Dublin showed the plate hung in the house. It strikes us deep in our heart with the extreme example of solidarity, generosity, kindness and compassion that the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma showed towards the victims of “An Gorta Mor” – Irish Great Famine of 1847 by donating 710 Dollars, despite enduring the Trail of Tears after the series of forced removal from their ancestral homes.

Ireland has since become a nation which respects and stands for human rights, and becomes an exemplary champion of human rights.

Now is the time for this great city to forge another unbreakable bond with another persecuted people who face the mirror-image of “Trail of Tears”, and it is time to show the world that this historical city still carries the honour, the freedom and the hope which is instilled for the deprived groups of people like the Rohingyas.

Thank you for being patient in reading this long letter from a community which still carries untold sufferings of over four decades which has intensified in recent months. We feel strongly the Dublin City Council need to know the full facts and the lived experience of the suffering of our brothers and sisters. 

We hope that Dublin City Council will follow other major cities in condemning the actions of Aung San Suu Kyi and to remove her from ‘the freedom of Dublin’ honours list. 

We look forward in great hope. 

Sincerely,

Haikal Mansor
The European Rohingya Council (ERC)
gsecretary@theerc.eu 
085 7692758

Mohammed Rafique
Rohingya Community Ireland (RCI)
rohingyaireland@gmail.com 
info@theerc.eu 
086 0391625

Pope Francis kisses the foot of a refugee during the foot washing ritual at the Castelnuovo di Porto refugees center near Rome, Italy, March 24, 2016. (Photo: OSSERVATORE ROMANO / REUTERS)

Dear Pope, 

Hope you are in good health and peace of mind. 

First of all, a heartiest welcome to you to Myanmar, my country. It is a deep boast of my country receiving a pontiff for first time. 

I'm Ro Mayyu Ali, a peace-loving Rohingya. Now, I become a refugee sheltering in neighbouring Bangladesh since September 6.

I believe in love, peace and kindness. Definitely these beautiful things in human hearts can lighten 

the values of dignity for human family. 

"When you experience bitterness, put your faith in all those who still work for good: in their humility lies the seed of a new world" once I came to read your tweet. Of course, being a Rohingya in Myanmar, I have lost my boyhood. I have lost my dreams. I have lost my hopes for Aung San Suu Kyi, my childhood hero. And recently I have lost even my birth place. I therefore, have been experiencing the worst bitterness in my life since childhood. 

But the hope I have in my heart for love and peace is still intact. The faith I put in all those who still work for good is still fresh. And you are one of those whom I put my faith in being a member of the world's most persecuted people. And I truly believe in your humility, there it lies the seed of a new change for my Rohingya people. 

"Our Rohingya brothers and sisters" is still echoing into my ears again and again. It directly submerges into the depth of my heart. And it always bestows me a light to keep hopes on you. 

Since then we, the Rohingya people feel have been always the brothers and sisters of the holy pontiff like you. The brothers and sisters of your papacy to champion peace and reconciliation and to speak up for the persecuted people suffering all over the world. 

We, the human family shall never forget the moment that you stopped your white Popemobile at the barrier between Palestine and Israel and kissed the separation wall during your visit to Bethlehem in 2014. It gave us the example of a famously independent move for the truth and human dignity. 

Moreover, my heart beats in joys coming to know that you will visit to meet with 620,000 Rohingya refugees who have the stories of gang rape, mass killing, mass grave and infants throwing into fire. Since then, we, the Rohingya refugees lose our breath to receive you, the one who treats us as brothers and sisters and embrace you, the one whose heart has the truth and love for human family. 

Can you hear us again "Our Rohingya brothers and sisters", please? It is the drops of remedy for our decade-long depressed souls. 

Can't wait to hear from you more!


Your sincerely,


Ro Mayyu Ali
(a Rohingya refugee) 
Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh

2 November 2017: A Rohingya refugee with a child strapped to his back walks into Palongkhali in Bangladesh's Ukhia district after being held in the 'no-man's land' between Myanmar and Bangladesh. (Photo: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP)

November 2, 2017

The Honorable Rex Tillerson
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

The Honorable Steven Mnuchin
Secretary of the Treasury
U.S. Department of the Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20220

Re: Burma and Targeted Sanctions

Dear Secretaries Tillerson and Mnuchin,

The US government urgently needs to act to help address the grave human rights and humanitarian crisis that has resulted from the Burmese military’s brutal response to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)’s August 25 attack on government posts in Burma’s Rakhine State.

As you know, since late August, Burmese security forces have waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing and committed numerous crimes against humanity against the Rohingya population, a long-persecuted ethnic and religious minority group predominantly in Rakhine State. In response to these abuses, more than 600,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh over the past two months.

Satellite images commissioned by independent organizations show hundreds of burned villages – and tens of thousands of torched buildings. Refugees have provided first-hand accounts of unfathomable brutality: soldiers burning infants alive, gang-raping women, shooting villagers fleeing their homes – violations that research by nongovernmental organizations has found to be widespread and systematic. 

United Nations investigators who have conducted interviews of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have noted “a consistent, methodical pattern of actions resulting in gross human rights violations affecting hundreds of thousands of people.” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, has called the scale and nature of the atrocities in Rakhine a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Despite international condemnation, Burmese authorities continue to restrict access to the region for most international humanitarian organizations, a UN fact-finding mission, and independent media. The commander-in-chief of the Burmese military, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and other Burmese officials, refuse to acknowledge the atrocities their forces have committed.

We commend the U.S. government for the nearly $104 million in humanitarian assistance it has provided in fiscal year 2017, nearly $40 million of which was provided in direct response to the Rakhine State crisis, to displaced populations in Burma and refugees in neighboring countries. We also strongly support the State Department’s statement that “individuals or entities responsible for atrocities, including non-state actors and vigilantes, be held accountable.”

It is critical that the U.S. government respond to the severity and scope of the Burmese military’s ethnic cleansing campaign with effective action. To this end, we urge the administration to immediately and robustly impose targeted economic sanctions authorized under the 2008 JADE Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Under the JADE Act, the president is empowered to issue travel restrictions and financial sanctions against Burmese military officials and their immediate family members if they are “involved in…gross violations of human rights in Burma or in the commission of other human rights abuses.” Steps taken by the previous administration to lift sanctions did not unravel existing authorities but only waived them, and, according to recent State Department releases, some JADE Act authorities are currently in use, such as the ban on current and former Burmese military officials traveling to the United States. The administration should move to robustly and vigorously employ the remaining authorities. 

In addition to the JADE Act, the administration should exercise its authority granted under the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows for the levying of travel restrictions and financial sanctions against individuals responsible for acts of significant corruption and gross violations of internationally recognized human rights committed against individuals who seek “to obtain, exercise, defend, or promote internationally recognized human rights and freedoms, such as the freedom of religion.” Given that the Burmese military’s actions against the Rohingya people are motivated at least in part on religious grounds, the Global Magnitsky Act is applicable.

Given the systemic nature of the crimes being perpetrated against the Rohingya people, it is important that sanctions designations levied under either the JADE Act or Global Magnitsky Act target appropriately senior officials who likely ordered criminal acts or appear to have been criminally responsible as a matter of command responsibility. Command responsibility would encompass those senior-most members of the Burmese security forces who knew or had reason to know that their subordinates were committing extrajudicial killings, rape, arson and other abuses, and failed to take all necessary and reasonable steps to prevent such abuses or punish those responsible.

As you recently said, Secretary Tillerson, “the world cannot just sit idly by and be witness to these atrocities.” The JADE Act and Global Magnitsky Act provide the executive branch with tools for action. The United States should employ them to the fullest to prevent dire consequences for Burma’s future and send an unmistakable signal to the rest of the world.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,

Human Rights Watch
Human Rights First
AFL-CIO
ALTSEAN-Burma
Ameinu (Our People)
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain
American Jewish Committee
American Jewish World Service
Anti-Defamation League
Association Suisse Birmanie
Boat People SOS
Buddhist Global Relief
Burma Action Ireland
Burma Campaign UK
Burma Human Rights Network
Burma Task Force
Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK
Center for Justice & Accountability
Christian Solidarity Worldwide
Congregation Tehillah
CREDO
Emgage Action
Estonian American National Council
Equal Rights Trust 
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR-USA)
Freedom House
Friends Committee on National Legislation
Fortify Rights
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Global Progressive Hub
Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College
Info Birmanie
Institute for Asian Democracy
Interfaith Center of New York
International Campaign for the Rohingya
International State Crime Initiative
Investors Against Genocide
Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights
JACOB: The Jewish Alliance of Concern Over Burma
Jewish Council for Public Affairs
Joint Baltic American National Committee
Jubilee Campaign USA Inc
Just Foreign Policy
Magnitsky Act Initiative
Muslim Bar Association of New York
Muslim Public Affairs Council
Partners Relief & Development
Physicians for Human Rights
Refugees International
Society for Threatened Peoples - Germany
STAND: The Student-Led Movement to End Mass Atrocities
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders
The Network of Spiritual Progressives
T'ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
Viet Tan
Win Without War

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    • Rohingya Exodus