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News > World

US Holocaust Museum Revokes Award to Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi

  • Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to the Myanmar community living in Singapore.

    Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to the Myanmar community living in Singapore. | Photo: Reuters

Published 7 March 2018
Opinion

“We had hoped that you … would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign (against) the targeted Rohingya population,” said the museum.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has taken back the human rights award it had granted to Myanmar’s civilian leader, Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, saying she has not stopped — let alone acknowledged — the country’s ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya Muslim minority.

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“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 a letter to Aung San Suu Kyi, dated Tuesday.

Instead, the letter said that she and her political party, the National League for Democracy, have blocked access to journalists and investigators, as well as “promulgated hateful rhetoric against the Rohingya community.”

The de facto leader was only the second person to receive the award in 2012, given annually by the museum “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.”

The museum calls on Aung San Suu Kyi to cooperate with United Nations investigators, as well as to amend a 1982 law that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship. The Rohingya have lived in the western region of Myanmar near Bangladesh for centuries.

Since last August, Myanmar security forces have killed thousands of Rohingya in the western state of Rakhine. More than 700,000 of them have fled the country, the majority to Bangladesh. Soldiers have, in turn, burned down Rohingya villages, burying the dead in mass graves.

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