Prominent human rights group strips Myanmar leader of its highest honor
One of the world’s most prominent human rights organizations has stripped Myanmar’s de facto head of government, Aung San Suu Kyi, of its highest honor.
Amnesty International released a statement Monday saying the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who became the symbol of resistance to an authoritarian regime, has failed to intervene in the humanitarian crisis facing the Rohingya people in her country.
“As an Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience, our expectation was that you would continue to use your moral authority to speak out against injustice wherever you saw it, not least within Myanmar itself,” wrote Kumi Naidoo, the organization’s secretary-general.
The announcement came on the eighth anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in 2010. It was the first time that Amnesty International has withdrawn the award, which it bestowed upon her in 2009.
“Today, we are profoundly dismayed that you no longer represent a symbol of hope, courage, and the undying defense of human rights,” the letter continued. ”Amnesty International cannot justify your continued status as a recipient of the Ambassador of Conscience award and so with great sadness we are hereby withdrawing it from you.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Aung San Suu Kyi the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights in Myanmar. She had been under house arrest for more than a decade for resisting the military junta that had ruled Burma since 1962. Her pro-democracy organization clamored for civilian control over the country’s affairs.
Since August, 2017, some 750,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine State in mainly Buddhist Myanmar and languish in squalid camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. That's when the military launched a campaign of retaliation after Rohingya rebel attacks on security forces that has alarmed human rights advocates for its brutality. Tactics include torture, rape, murder and the burning of villages.
Members of the UN Security Council visited the refugee camp and met with Aung San Suu Kyi earlier this year. In 2016, she was named state counsellor, a position that was created for her. The 15-member body issued a news statement saying the ambassadors were “struck by the scale of the humanitarian crisis and remain gravely concerned by the current situation.”
Shortly after that visit last spring, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights and the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect called on the Security Council to refer the crisis to the International Criminal Court. The court, which convenes in The Hague, could prosecute individuals for crimes against humanity and genocide.
But since the crisis broke out, human rights advocates said, she has either remained silent or appeared to dismiss the victims’ claims. She has also defended a court’s decision to jail two journalists from Reuters who were investigating a massacre of the Rohingya.
She said the journalists were jailed for seven years not because of their work, but because they possessed police documents and, therefore, violated the state secrets act.
“Her denial of the gravity and scale of the atrocities means there is little prospect of the situation improving for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya living in limbo in Bangladesh or for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who remain in Rakhine State,” wrote Naidoo. “Without acknowledgment of the horrific crimes against the community, it is hard to see how the government can take steps to protect them from future atrocities.”
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