WHEN is the international community going to wake up and smell the coffee? Ethnic cleansing every bit as disgusting as the Serb barbarities in Bosnia is taking place in Myanmar, the country led by the Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. But the world is sitting on its hands and doing precisely nothing.
In the last fortnight more than 123,000 Rohingya refugees have fled across the border into Bangladesh. The tide is growing. In the course of Monday alone, 35,000 more arrived. Where is the international protest? Where are the dire warnings that this crime against humanity cannot be allowed to continue? Where are the sanctions? Where is the threat to intervene and stop this monstrous crime? Where indeed is the Nobel Peace Prize organization and why are they not threatening to strip Aung San Suu Kyi of the honor, which it seemed that she once so richly deserved?
“The Lady” as her supporters call her, used to argue that her government was politically vulnerable. The military junta that she and her party, the National League for Democracy replaced, had kept the defense and interior ministries and given themselves a portion of the seats in the parliament. Her message was that she should proceed with caution. Last year, this still seemed reasonable enough, even though the still-appalling position of her country’s Muslim minorities, particularly the Rohingya, clearly needed addressing. She protested this was on her agenda. It is now clear either that she was lying or the woman regularly compared to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela has lacked the vision and political guts to act in defense of a significant minority of her fellow countrymen. This failure betrays every value of justice and decency, which she once claimed to support.
Had she acted earlier, this disastrous ethnic cleansing might have been avoided. At the very least she could have moved to award full citizenship to the Rohingya who have lived in Myanmar for generations, but since the country gained independence from its British imperial occupiers, always as second class and generally persecuted citizens. She did try to move against the violent Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu and his bloodthirsty 969 group, also known as the Ma Ba Tha. The movement has been proscribed but has refused to accept its banning and is openly challenging her authority.
Now she is facing the dire consequences of her failures. The security forces have run amok. Reacting to what may or may not have been an attack by Rohingyan militants, the army has begun a wholesale campaign to drive all Rohingyans out of the country.
She may not have the power, let alone the people, to arrest the army commanders responsible for this terrible crime. But she does still have her voice. She is still nominally the ruler of Myanmar. She can declare right now that what is happening to the Rohingya is a crime against her people. She can declare right now that that the Rohingya Muslims are every bit as Burmese as she is. And she can appeal right now for international help to stop this ethnic cleansing and ask the International Criminal Court to open in investigation into the thuggery that is taking place in her country, with a view to prosecuting all those who are guilty, with the full cooperation of her government.
