Rohingya massacre revokes Holocaust Museum award

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has revoked a prestigious human rights award it had given to Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, faulting her for failing to try to halt, or even mention, the ethnic cleansing of her country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

The award, is given annually “to an internationally prominent individual whose actions have advanced the Museum’s vision of a world where people confront hatred, prevent genocide and promote human dignity.”

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who endured 15 years of house arrest for taking on the military dictatorship in Myanmar, was only the second person to receive the award in 2012.

It was named after Elie Wiesel, a fellow recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and a Holocaust survivor who was one of the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s founders.

But Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the museum said, has failed to live up to that vision.

“We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population,” the museum said in the letter dated March 6, 2016.

Instead, the letter said, she and her ruling political party, the National League for Democracy, have refused to cooperate with United Nations investigators, blocked access to journalists and “promulgated hateful rhetoric against the Rohingya community.”

The museum’s decision is perhaps the strongest rebuke yet of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been increasingly criticized as an apologist for Buddhist nationalism and the Myanmar military’s campaign of ethnic violence against the Rohingya Muslim population.

Beginning last August, Myanmar’s military, joined by armed Buddhist civilians, systematically killed thousands of Rohingya in the western state of Rakhine. As many as 700,000 more fled across the border to Bangladesh, where they remain. Behind them, soldiers moved in to burn their villages and bury the dead in mass graves.

The United States and other countries have accused the Myanmar authorities of ethnic cleansing, while the United Nations special envoy on human rights in Myanmar said the killings bore “the hallmarks of a genocide.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has refused to even utter the word Rohingya in public. In private, she becomes angry when the topic comes up, according to people who have spoken with her. In a 2017 interview she said: “Let me be clear that I would like to be seen as a politician, not some human rights icon.”

Though she has set up half a dozen commissions to look into the violence, which began after Rohingya militants attacked Myanmar security posts, the authorities continue to insist that no Rohingya civilians have been harmed.

In its letter, the Holocaust Museum acknowledged “the difficult situation you must face in confronting decades of military misrule.”

But the museum said the scale of the human suffering inflicted on the Rohingya demands action. It called on her to cooperate with United Nations investigators to establish details about the violence and to help bring those responsible to justice.

It also urged her to amend a 1982 law that stripped the Rohingya, who have lived in the western region of Myanmar near Bangladesh for centuries, of their citizenship.

For many of her admirers, her handling of the Rohingya issue has been nothing short of a betrayal. But the museum said the scale of the human suffering inflicted on the Rohingya demands action. It called on her to cooperate with United Nations investigators to establish details about the violence and to help bring those responsible to justice.

It also urged her to amend a 1982 law that stripped the Rohingya, who have lived in the western region of Myanmar near Bangladesh for centuries, of their citizenship.

The letter closes with a quote from Eli Wiesel: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

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Rabbi Maller’s web site is: www.rabbimaller.com. His new book ‘Judaism and Islam as Synergistic Monotheisms: A Reform Rabbi’s Reflections on the Profound Connectedness of Islam and Judaism’ (a collection of 31 articles by Rabbi Maller previously published by Islamic web sites) is now for sale ($15) on Amazon and Morebooks.