Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s True Colors Shine!
NOBEL LAUREATES, 29 Jan 2018
Dr. Maung Zarni – TRANSCED Media Service
25 Jan 2018 – Aung San Suu Kyi’s Social Welfare Minister has declared already that all the burned lands in the region stretching over 100 km (68 miles) are reclaimed by the State. Northern Rakhine region of predominantly Rohingya residents has also been designated as the Special Economic Zone II: Zone I is in the area which were cleared of Rohingya and other Muslim habitation (communities) in the 2012 bouts of large scaled organized ‘mass violence’ backed by the State under Thein Sein’s presidency (2010-15).
She has made no attempt to travel across the border j–in fact 30 minutes helicopter ride or 10 minutes boat ride across the boundary Naf River to the vast Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar. Instead she has gone to N. Rakhine State –not with UN investigators or diplomats in Yangon, but with her hand-picked cronies.
The world has long been fooled by the true colours of this manufactured Burmese icon of human rights and democracy.
She made her name on the corpses of Burmese democrats who died struggling for a freer Burma, and now she is going to strengthen and deepen her symbiosis with the Burmese cronies and military families which control the Burmese economy, on the mass graves of Rohingyas.
We are witnessing nothing short of the emergence of a cold-hearted and immoral Burmese politician. Suu Kyi’s evident priority to turn the killing fields of Western Burma (stretching over 100 KM in length) into a lucrative opportunity for the local cronies who financially support her and her party is utterly morally repugnant.
In countries which have a dark history of genocides and crimes against humanity such as Cambodia, Germany and Bosnia, the sites of mass killings and destruction are national or world heritage sites. In sharp contrast, Myanmar State Counsellor is evidently trying to turn the killing fields and mass graves into industrial agricultural projects, mineral exploration, beach resorts and tax-free Special Economic Zone where the Rohingyas who survived the latest bout of slaughter by her father’s army would be allowed to work as cheap labourers for her cronies.
Aung San Suu Kyi is not simply “lacking moral leadership” as the US diplomat Bill Richardson put it reportedly, when he resigned yesterday from what he called Aung San Suu Kyi’s (genocide) “white wash” international advisory commission; she is proving herself to be as cold, commercially minded and criminally responsible for the plight of the genocide victims as any past genocidal leader in history, Europe or Asia or elsewhere.
She has in fact already taken her favorite cronies and their families on the exploratory tour of parts of these vast killing fields from where over 750,000 fled in a span of 4 months last year. We have seen pictures of smiling Suu Kyi posing with these cronies in these ghostly villages.
Lest we forget genocides are not simply one-dimensional racist destruction: economic benefits always accrue the perpetrating. At Auschwitz, Himmler and his men, for instance, were keen on providing German corporations with inmate labourers, as well as commercially motivated “agriculturalists”.
The level of callousness this woman displays is beyond not just words, but imagination.
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A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).
The Nobel Peace Prize 1991 was awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 29 Jan 2018.
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