If it were any other religion or ethnicity being targeted, would Suu Kyi’s laurels be safe?
“No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim,” Aung San Suu Kyi complained in 2013, while speaking to a BBC reporter. This woman was once heralded as a sign of strength and resilience. Now, she’s becoming the face of a genocide.
Reports from the Rohingya community are hair raising, including the story of a village which, after it was struck by missiles this August, was doused with petrol and set alight by soldiers.
Last year, 11 of Suu Kyi’s peers signed an open letter warning against the potential for genocide. Condemning the state of the Rohingya, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the award, said in a Twitter post: “I am still waiting for my fellow Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same. The world is waiting and the Rohingya Muslims are waiting.”
This isn’t an isolated incident anymore. It’s a bonafide military operation. And with the eyes of the world on her, one does wonder how long Suu Kyi will continue to argue that this is not, in fact, ethnic cleansing. Perhaps though, she’s taken a look at other humanitarian crisis points, like Gaza, Uyghur or Kashmir, and is simply biding her time for the world to find something else to talk about.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. The Nobel prize has been one of the highest honours created for the recognition of the excellence in the pursuit of science, literature, activism and the greatest advancements in the aid of human kind, though some have clearly been handed out amidst controversy. While many have thought it unlikely that she’ll be stripped of her laurels – there is no precedent for it — one must look back at the list of Nobel laureates and wonder if this is really the legacy the prize must leave behind.
