On Wednesday evening, Dublin city councillors overwhelmingly voted to rescind the freedom of that historic city from Myanmar’s de facto political leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, over her failure to protect the Rohingya people from her security and military forces as they participated in a pogrom against the Muslim minority. The extent of Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu Kyi’s inaction and silence has been fully catalogued and reported by another Nobel recipient, the group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). In a shocking and damning report also released on Wednesday, MSF said that more than 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were slaughtered in the outbreak of violence that began around August 20. And out of that figure, at least 730 infants and children under the age of five were killed in the orgy of murder. While reports of widespread slaughter of Rohingya are already available, this is the first time a highly reputed organisation has documented the extend of atrocities and killings in the Rakhine state after an extensive research.
Nearly 650,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh to avoid the killing gangs unleashed on a largely unarmed and unprotected civilian population, with the United Nations terming the episode of bloodletting as a classic case of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, families fleeing their homes and villages had to cross a frontier territory laid afresh with new landmines, an indiscriminate and horrific weapon banned by international treaty and used without conscience by military forces under the supervision of the government Suu Kyi leads.
Throughout, Suu Kyi’s silence has been deafening. At least MSF stands with the courage and convictions of its Nobel Peace Prize to give voice to the Rohingya when they need it most.
