Yesterday I wrote about the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, who live in Rakhine State, Myanmar (Burma). For some years they have been in conflict with the ethnic Burmese. Last month the situation escalated when Rohingya jihadists attacked government outposts. The jihadists, like jihadists everywhere, are a blight on the landscape. The military counterattacked, as they should. But the brutal nature of the counterattack, drawing no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, is shaping up to be one of the great crimes of our still young century. Together with Rakhine civilians, who they armed, the military burned dozens of Rohingya villages and murdered numerous women, children, and elderly, triggering a humanitarian crisis that sent nearly 400,000 Rohingya—almost half their population—fleeing to Bangladesh. A skeptical world may doubt some of the harrowing stories told by the refugees. But there is no doubting the burning of the villages. The flame and smoke are there for all to see.
Despite the horrific nature of the crisis, I ended on an optimistic note:
In the absence of any acceptance of responsibility by the government, all eyes have turned to Aung San Suu Kyi, holder of the Nobel Peace Prize and de facto leader of Myanmar…For some years now, she’s been evasive about Rakhine…But with the recent attention, perhaps she is reconsidering. A spokesman for Ms. Suu Kyi announced that she will deliver an address on the situation this week. The world will be watching.
Ms. Suu Kyi gave her speech this morning.
It was awful.
I have sympathy for Ms. Suu Kyi, I really do. For decades, as leader of the opposition against Burma’s military government, she suffered numerous rounds of house arrest. And now, with the return of civilian rule, she has taken on the task of rebuilding a poverty-stricken and divided country. It’s an excruciatingly difficult job, and I realize I’m guilty of some Monday morning quarterbacking here.
But, God, that speech was awful.
She did not acknowledge the seriousness of the atrocities. “There are allegations and counter-allegations,” she said. “I have not gone into any of them because it is not my purpose to promote and encourage conflict.” So she hid behind the “both sides” argument, and not for the first time. And she did it disingenuously: when it came to the allegations against the Rohingya, she did go into them.
There was no acceptance of responsibility on the part of the government. Instead she called for more study to find out what was really happening—which Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already been doing for weeks.
There was no plan put forward for stopping the violence. Indeed she denied there was anything to stop. “Since the 5th of September, there have been no armed clashes and there have been no clearance operations,” she claimed, apparently incorrectly. CNN reports, “Satellite imagery examined by Amnesty International appears to show more than a dozen burned villages and fires since that date.”
Some of what Ms. Suu Kyi said was downright absurd. “We are concerned that numbers of Muslims are fleeing across the border to Bangladesh. We want to find out why this exodus is happening.”
See above, re: burning villages.
And then there’s this jewel: “The great majority of Muslims in the Rakhine state have not joined the exodus. More than 50% of the villages of Muslims are intact.”
What a relief to know that only half the Rohingya have been driven away!
But more than anything else, Ms. Suu Kyi’s address was technocrat-speak. Instead of the leader that I know she is, she sounded like a Soviet apparatchik or an EU bureaucrat:
We had established a central committee for rule of law and development in the Rakhine… In accordance with the counterterrorism law, section six, subsection 5…
The final report of the advisory committee…
A strategy with specific timeline has been developed to move forward the national verification process…
Social development programs…
Sustainable development…
The Rakhine state socioeconomic development plan, 2017 to 2021, has been drafted to boost regional development in various sectors…
Yes, she literally cited the Five Year Plan.
Toward the end of her speech, Ms. Suu Kyi offered a metaphor which I thought was instructive. Her intent was to deflect attention from Rakhine state to the problems of Myanmar as a whole:
I would like to use the analogy of a healthy human being. A healthy human has to be healthy all over—you cannot neglect his general health, just to concentrate on one particular ill.
Yes, you can concentrate on one particular ill. When things are bad enough, you have to concentrate on one particular ill. Like if a patient is brought into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. Stop the bleeding. Don’t inquire into whether he gets enough exercise or has too much salt in his diet!
So it is with nations. I’m all for sustainable development and strategies with specific timelines. But there are always unforeseen events that disrupt the Five Year Plan. That's one of the great insights of conservatism and one of the reasons socialism doesn't work. And when events occur, a leader has to deal with them, and that's what Ms. Suu Kyi is not doing. Stopping the bleeding.
I recognize Aung San Suu Kyi has many constraints and few options. I recognize that, under Burma’s Constitution, she does not control the military. But at the very least, she can speak out against the very real atrocities happening in her country. Some say that words don’t make any difference, but I beg to differ: Aung San Suu Kyi’s whole life is proof that they do.
Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092. It depicts the war for the Muslim soul between those who seek to enforce shari’a strictly, persecute Jews and Christians, and stamp out "un-Islamic" science, and those who wink at a few sins, tolerate their non-Muslim neighbors, and write science books instead of burning them.
No comments:
Post a Comment