Aung San Suu Kyi is an apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape. For the past year, Aung San Suu Kyi has been State Counselor, or de facto head of government, in Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the northern Rakhine state have been shot, stabbed, starved, robbed, raped and driven from their homes in the hundreds of thousands.
In December, while the world focused on the fall of Aleppo, more than a dozen Nobel Laureates published an open letter warning of a tragedy in Rakhine “amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
In February, a report by the United Nations documented how the Burmese army’s attacks on the Rohingya were “widespread as well as systematic” thus “indicating the very likely commission of crimes against humanity.” More than half of the 101 Rohingya women interviewed by UN investigators across the border in Bangladesh said they had suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence at the hands of security forces.
“They beat and killed my husband with a knife,” one survivor recalled. “Five of them took off my clothes and raped me. My eight‐month old son was crying of hunger when they were in my house because he wanted to breastfeed, so to silence him they killed him too with a knife.”
And the response of Aung San Suu Kyi? This once‐proud campaigner against wartime rape and human rights abuses by the Burmese military has opted to borrow from the Donald Trump playbook of denial and deflection. Her office accused Rohingya women of fabricating stories of sexual violence and put the words “fake rape” — in the form of a banner headline, no less — on its official website.
A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry — also controlled directly by Aung San Suu Kyi — dismissed “made‐up stories, blown out of proportion.” In February, the State Counselor herself reportedly told the Archbishop of Yangon, Charles Bo, that the international community is exaggerating the Rohingya issue
Rohingyas, considered the world’s most persecuted minority, have lived for centuries in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine state. Denied citizenship by a military junta since 1982, they have been stateless and without the most basic human rights, thus prey to indiscriminate rape, torture and killing by Myanmar’s military, militants and organised mobs.
In recent days, however, eyewitness accounts of mass rape, killing and ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims have horrified the world. Families, including new-borns, have been slaughtered and burned alive. Whole regions have been bombed and targeted for mass killings.
United Nations officials report that hundreds of thousands of Rohingya women, children and men are streaming into neighbouring Bangladesh after trudging through treacherous ravines and jungles, many falling along the way.
We demand that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace-prize winner who is the de facto leader of Myanmar, stop the torture and killings of Rohingyas.
Aung San Suu Kyi has not said a word so far, a stance that has been denounced by many governments including the UN but unfortunately, not ours. Her silence has only emboldened Myanmar’s militants and security forces in their relentless, seemingly state-sponsored genocide of the Rohingyas.
We demand that Aung San Suu Kyi and her Government put an immediate end to this indiscriminate killing, torture and forceful deportation of Rohingyas from their country. Failing which, she no longer deserves her Nobel Peace Prize.