"Strip Aung Saan Su Kyi of Her Peace Prize For Silence on Rohingya": Petition to Nobel Committee

NEW DELHI: A petition to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to strip Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi of her Nobel Peace Prize for her silence and complicity on the Rohingya genocide is fast getting signatures from all across the globe.

Created by Ika Ferrer G. from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the petition is being moved by Avaaz, a US based powerful online activist network.

Pointing out that several Nobel laureates had earlier signed a statement warning of ethnic cleansing and crime against humanity in Rakhine, the petition wonders at 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.” The petition open to signatures from across the world urges the Nobel Committee to strip her of the award.

The petition reads:

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.