No relief for Muslims: Muslim’s Genocide to continue under Aung San Suu Kyi regime

by Tauqeer Abbas
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suukiya

 

Win Mya Mya has given everything for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party – including the use of her left hand. Drawing back the thin sleeve of her purple silk shirt, she reveals a disfigured appendage that gives her near-constant pain. “She can’t even use it in the bathroom,” her sister says. The wound dates back to 2003 when Win Mya Mya was part of a Suu Kyi convoy attacked by a mob sponsored by the former ruling military junta. Scores of people were killed. She spent years in jail and her family’s shop was seized. “I would die for the NLD,” she says, speaking of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party. But despite this devotion, Win Mya Mya could not stand for them in an election. Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world’s genuine heroes, won democracy for her country, culminating in historic elections in November that her party won in a landslide. As winner, Aung San Suu Kyi is also inheriting the worst ethnic cleansing you’ve never heard of, Myanmar’s destruction of a Muslim minority called the Rohingya. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi seems to plan to continue this Myanmar version of apartheid. She is now a politician, and oppressing a minority like the Rohingya is popular with mostly Buddhist voters. The United Nations has been dysfunctional in Myanmar. Another internal U.N. document shared with me (both provided by a critic of U.N. passivity on the issue) warns that U.N. staff members in Myanmar are feuding with one another and it raises “the question of possible complicity of the U.N. in potential crimes against humanity.” Bravo to advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights andUnited to End Genocide that have spotlighted the continuing brutality against the Rohingya. Kudos to humanitarian groups that ease the suffering where the government allows them to: On one large island that I reached by boat, Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children are providing lifelines of health care and education. The Myanmar government is not only oppressing individuals; it is also trying to eradicate the Rohingya people as an ethnic group, by claiming that it does not exist. The authorities don’t use the word Rohingya and claim that these are just illegal immigrants from Bangladesh (this is preposterous; historical documents refer to the Rohingya). In November, the government arrested five men simply for printing a 2016 calendar making references to the Rohingya as an ethnic group. Defenders of Myanmar and of Aung San Suu Kyi note that the country has many problems; they see the Rohingya as one misfortune in a nation with a vast swath of misfortunes. The priorities, as they see them, are economic development, democracy and an end to the country’s many local conflicts, and they protest that it’s myopic to focus on the problems of one ethnic group in a nation so full of challenges.

 

pk.shafaqna.com

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