A Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Shame
“We applauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she received her Nobel Prize
because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny,” noted Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
“They’re killing children,” Matthew Smith, the chief executive of a human rights group
called Fortify Rights, told me after interviewing refugees on the Bangladesh border.
Aung San Suu Kyi, a beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner, is presiding over an ethnic
cleansing in which villages are burned, women raped and children butchered.
They killed my husband by bullet.”
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the widow who defied Myanmar’s dictators, endured a total of 15 years of house arrest
and led a campaign for democracy, was a hero of modern times.
For the last three weeks, Buddhist-majority Myanmar has systematically slaughtered civilians belonging to the Rohingya Muslim minority,
forcing 270,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh — with Myanmar soldiers shooting at them even as they cross the border.
Yet today Daw Suu, as the effective leader of Myanmar, is chief apologist for this ethnic cleansing, as the country oppresses the darker-skinned Rohingya
and denounces them as terrorists and illegal immigrants.