Why Aung San Suu Kyi is silent about Rohingya?

The most persecuted minority in the world is the Rohingya in the Rakhine State of Myanmar. They have been systematically persecuted for decades, and it is sponsored by the Burmese government.

The shocking point is that the Noble Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who was a moral icon and human rights champion, has chosen to stay silent on the genocide.

The assumed reason behind her silence on the vulnerable minority is that it would be political suicide to speak up for this oppressed minority since Myanmar is overwhelmingly Buddhist and has an influential radical Buddhist political movement. She is hoping to help her party win in the general election to be held at the end of the year. She is now a cynical politician who is willing to put votes ahead of principles; party political advancement ahead of innocent Rohingya lives.

Suu Kyi has tried several times to explain the matter in recent years about her reluctance to speak out for the Rohingya. At one point she said that a public airing of her views could further make the issue worse, that it would add fuel to the fire of the radical Buddhists who have ransacked Rohingya villages, sending more than 140,000 Rohingya to internally displaced camps.

Jonah Fisher, a BBC correspondent in Yangon, said in a Twitter post that Suu Kyi’s latest statement on the Rohingya was that it was the government’s duty to solve the issue.

Her critics have said that someone of her enormous moral authority in Myanmar should take a stronger stance.

“A country that is not at peace with itself, that fails to acknowledge and protect the dignity and worth of all its people, is not a free country,” Archbishop Tutu said in remarks that were broadcast at a conference on the Rohingya in Oslo this week.

He said he agreed with those who say a “slow genocide” was being committed against the Rohingya.

Whatever it is, her silence is inexcusable. “In a genocide, silence is complicity, so it is with Aung San Suu Kyi,” said Penny Green, a law Professor at the University of London and director of the International State Crime Initiative, in an opinion comment published in The Independent (UK).

- The reader is the managing director of a general trading company based in Sharjah