Sad transition for peace icon Aung San Suu Kyi

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s appearance before the International Court of Justice as apologist-in-chief for Myanmar’s generals shreds what little was left of her reputation as a courageous fighter for human rights and democracy. For 15 years across a period of 21 years, Ms Suu Kyi was held under house arrest by the generals in conditions of considerable deprivation. When, in 1991, she was awarded the prize for her “nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights” in Myanmar, the world applauded. She assumed an almost saintly aura, her determination and self-sacrifice for the cause of liberty compared to Nelson Mandela.

Those who acclaimed her then would have been appalled by the role she played in The Hague hearings as she sought to defend the same corps of generals that treated her so brutally against charges of genocide and gross human rights abuses targeted at majority Buddhist Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority. Ms Suu Kyi, who is effectively Myanmar’s prime minister, emerged as the craven, genocide-denying champion of an army that stands accused, after intensive UN and other investigations, of carrying out mass murder, rape and the destruction of Rohingya communities amounting to crimes against humanity launched with deliberate genocidal intent.

Ms Suu Kyi herself has spoken out in the past against such crimes. In 2011 she said: “Rape is used as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate ethnic nationalities and divide our country.” At the ICJ, Ms Suu Kyi did not dispute that 73,000 Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine province have been driven from their homes and fled to Bangladesh. Nor that at least 10,000 have been killed in what lawyers for The Gambia, using formulations drawn from the Holocaust to initiate the proceedings, described as a military operation “intended to destroy the Rohingya as a group”. Myanmar, Ms Suu Kyi insisted, was being miscast as a genocidal regime. She didn’t deny mass killings of Rohingya. But nothing that had happened, she maintained, amounted to genocide, even though she conceded military gunships were used to attack Rohingya as they fled.

Ms Suu Kyi’s testimony represents a sad transition for the former human rights icon, and will do nothing to help the Rohingya in their battle to survive against attacks by the Myanmar military. Through her father, General Aung San, who was regarded as the father of the nation and was the founder of the Tatmadaw, the modern Myanmar armed forces, Ms Suu Kyi has longstanding links to the army. Her defence of the military reportedly “pleased” the generals. It may even persuade them finally to allow her to fulfil her ambition to become president. Her cynical willingness at the ICJ to take on the burden of defending their crimes, however, will do nothing for any claim she may still have to “sainthood”, and nothing for the rights of the persecuted Rohingya minority. The Nobel committee should consider whether she still deserves the prize.