Claiming that Aung San Suu Kyi has chosen to turn a blind eye to the genocide taking place in her country to retain her political power, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Iran’s Shirin Ebadi said on Thursday that their fellow laureate has sold her soul to the devil.

The laureate came up with this remark at a program titled ‘Combating Violence Against Women and Advancing Women’s Rights’ arranged by Naripokkho and Nobel Women’s Initiatives in Dhaka where she and another Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Northern Ireland’s Mairead Maguire talked to female reporters of the country.

“When Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, Mairead and I staged several campaigns in order to secure her release, we even staged demonstration outside the Myanmar Embassy in Washington,” she said adding, “However, unfortunately, when she was released from the house arrest she sold her soul to the devil.”

Shirin said she, as a Muslim laureate, has written several open letters to Suu Kyi saying that her silence is shameful. “I urged her to take a stance breaking her silence, but Suu Kyi didn’t reply to any of them.”

Suu Kyi appears to have forgotten how she suffered when she was under house arrest. Now the Rohingya Muslims are suffering at least ten times more than any of her sufferings but she wants to hold on her political power, she added.

Urging for a peaceful solution, Mairead Maguire said dialogue and diplomacy are very important to solve the Rohingya crisis and the role played by Bangladesh is a model for the world.

She and the two other laureates will hopefully further detect the genocide of Rohingya people to the ICC and encourage the other countries to support Bangladesh for their inspirational works in the crisis, added the laureate.

She said it is also important to focus on the need of having dialogue and listening to each other to bring peace, while everybody, including the governments, has a role to play here.

Claiming that they have the evidence that the Rohingya issue is genocide, Mairead said their next course of action is to identify interested states through the UN who can take the Myanmar government to the ICC. “We want to find states that have passion for human rights and justice,” she added.

The three Nobel laureates – Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, Shirin Ebadi of Iran and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland – came to Bangladesh on a week-long visit to see the Rohingya situation on the ground.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative in collaboration with its partner in Bangladesh, Naripokkho, led the delegation to Bangladesh to better understand the situation of the Rohingya refugees and the two laureates except Tawakkol Karman joined the program to share their experiences with some of the female journalists of the country.

Courtesy: UNB
 

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An online petition on a platform called Change.org has demanded that the Nobel Peace Prize for peace given to her should be retrieved following her allegedly islamophobic and undemocratic stance in case of Rohingya Musims.So far, (as of November 2, 2016) the petition has been supported by over 87,000 people.

The petition refers to an incident in 2013, when Suu Kyi was interviewed by Mishal Hussain – a BBC anchor, who had questioned her stand on the plight of the Rohingya Muslim community in the country. It is claimed that Suu Kyi, who was allegedly visible upset had said, “No one told me that I was to be interviewed by a Muslim.”

The petition acknowledges her effort to bring a functional democracy into the country, but further states, “This opens up the prevailing question regarding Suu Kyi’s position on the Muslim minority in Myanmar.  There has been no official position from Suu Kyi with regards to the human right violations that have been rampant as experienced by the Rohingya minority.” 

Rohingya Muslims is a minority community from a Buddhist-majority country, which has been systematically persecuted and expunged from the national narrative, according to the news reports. Recently, TIME had reported that a study conducted by a UK-based university documents a systematic deterioration of the Rohingya’s situation since communal violence broke out in June 2012 in Burma’s Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state. Removed from Burma’s 135 officially recognised ethnicities in 1982, the Rohingya have faced discrimination for decades. It has been reported that in then heavily militarised area, soldiers have blocked access for aid workers and are accused of raping and killing civilians. 

Suu Kyi has not directly commented on those calls or on statements from human rights monitors, although she has urged the military to exercise restraint and act within the law, according to the news reports.

Renowned author and Kyi’s biographer Peter Popham writes in an article, “..there is nothing in Suu Kyi’s earlier life to lead one to think that she might be bigoted. As I revealed in my biography of Suu Kyi, The Lady and the Peacock, her first serious boyfriend when she was a student at Oxford was a Pakistani (he went on to become a top diplomat for his country), she lived for 20 years in multicultural Britain without manifesting any known anti-Muslim hostility, and one of the key people who persuaded her to get involved in Burma’s democracy uprising was Maung Thaw Ka, a Muslim journalist and author who subsequently died in jail.”

Despite her background, Suu Kyi has failed in voicing condemnation of the acts against the Muslin community, and never has made a statement in their support. On the contrary, she is being criticised for her overseas trips as the foreign minister of the country while the ongoing crisis threatens with a complete ethnic cleansing of the community.

Following these circumstances, the online petition has demanded confiscation of the Nobel Peace Prize given to her.

“The Nobel Prize is the highest prize only to be given to ‘people who have given their utmost to international brotherhood and sisterhood’.  These peaceful values need to be nurtured by the laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize, including Suu Kyi, until their last days.  When a laureate cannot maintain peace, then for the sake of peace itself the prize needs to be returned or confiscated by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Therefore, we hereby demand the Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee confiscate or take back the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi.  Only those who are serious in keeping the world peace may be awarded such a coveted prize,” demands the petition, which is addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee 2016.

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