Myanmar’s persecuted minority

Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi is bringing no credit to herself or her country’s fledgling democracy by failing to speak out against the human rights abuses being committed against the ethnic Rohingya minority. Despite holding civilian political power as State Counsellor under President Htin Kyaw, Ms Suu Kyi is under intense pressure from the powerful army, which controls a quarter of the parliamentary seats and all the key security ministries. She also faces constant pressure from militant Buddhist nationalists opposed to the mostly Muslim Rohingya, who were stripped of their citizenship rights under the military junta and have suffered decades of repression.

Ms Suu Kyi is also foreign minister. In failing to exert even moral pressure to condemn the latest army-led attacks that have killed hundreds of Rohingya and caused 80,000 to flee for their lives to neighbouring Bangladesh in just a few days, she is not living up to the expectations of her as a doughty leader for democracy.

Eyewitnesses report military helicopters “raining down fire on (non-combatant) civilians’’ and blocking their escape from villages in northern Rakhine state. Reportedly, security forces have shot and stabbed civilians, mainly women and children.

The brutality follows a series of attacks on August 25 on police posts and an army base by militants of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which is seeking to defend the Rohingya. Following those attacks, in which 110 people were killed, the Myanmar military, aided by Buddhist extremists, set fire to Rohingya villages. The violence is the worst assault in generations on the impoverished, stateless minority. An estimated 400,000 of one million Rohingya have fled Myanmar in recent years, mostly to Bangladesh. Whatever the pressures from the army and Buddhist extremists, Ms Suu Kyi’s government has a responsibility to apply the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Rakhine State headed by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. These included full citizenship rights and rule of law for the Rohingya.