Indian Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi says he is hugely disappointed with Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s stand on the Rohingya issue, calling it among this “era’s biggest humanitarian crises.”
Satyarthi said on Saturday that the Myanmar government’s handling of the crisis is “bad and unacceptable,” with more than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in the past month to neighbouring Bangladesh.
“Almost the entire Nobel Peace laureate community is hugely disappointed with our fellow Nobel laureate Suu Kyi,” he said. “We have written to her.”
He made the comments during his tour of India’s northeastern state of Assam as part of a walk-through campaign to spread awareness against child sex abuse and torture.
Satyarthi said, “The politics aside, it is a humanitarian crisis of gigantic proportions and Suu Kyi has to deal with that from that perspective.”
Satyarthi, a child rights activist, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, sharing it with Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai. Earlier this month, Malala had also condemned the violence against Rohingya and called upon Suu Kyi to denounce the “shameful treatment” of the community.
“The world is waiting and the Rohingya Muslims are waiting [for Suu Kyi to condemn the violence],” the girls’ education advocate wrote in a Twitter post.