Aung San Suu Kyi is only the latest to fail the Rohingya. More of this and the result will be genocide - Comment - Voices

/aung-san-suu-kyi-is-only-the-latest-to-

  • SPECIAL REPORT - In #Myanmar, #apartheid tactics against minority Muslims
    http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/05/15/myanmar-rohingya-idINDEE94E00G20130515

    A 16-year-old Muslim boy lay dying on a thin metal table. Bitten by a rabid dog a month ago, he convulsed and drooled as his parents wedged a stick between his teeth to stop him from biting off his tongue.

    Swift treatment might have saved Waadulae. But there are no doctors, painkillers or vaccines in this primitive hospital near Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State in western Myanmar. It is a lonely medical outpost that serves about 85,300 displaced people, almost all of them Muslims who lost their homes in fighting with Buddhist mobs last year.

    “All we can give him is sedatives,” said Maung Maung Hla, a former health ministry official who, despite lacking a medical degree, treats about 150 patients a day. The two doctors who once worked there haven’t been seen in a month. Medical supplies stopped when they left, said Maung Maung Hla, a Muslim.

    These trash-strewn camps represent the dark side of Myanmar’s celebrated transition to democracy: apartheid-like policies segregating minority Muslims from the Buddhist majority. As communal violence spreads, nowhere are these practices more brutally enforced than around Sittwe.

    In an echo of what happened in the Balkans after the fall of communist Yugoslavia, the loosening of authoritarian control in Myanmar is giving freer rein to ethnic hatred.

    #Birmanie

    #Aung_San_Suu_Kyi is only the latest to fail the #Rohingya. More of this and the result will be #genocide
    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/aung-san-suu-kyi-is-only-the-latest-to-fail-the-rohingya-more-of-this

    In recent days, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, having just been awarded a prestigious human rights prize by the EU, sat down with the BBC in London and in her beguilingly gentle fashion denied the ethnic cleansing of one of the world’s most vulnerable minorities.
    In a manner reminiscent of Burmese President Thein Sein, a master in the art of evasive platitudes, the usually eloquent democracy activist issued a series of slippery answers in response to repeated questions on the issue from journalist Mishal Husain.

    Her statements, at times bordering on abject denialism, have already been ably eviscerated by David Blair in the Telegraph.

    Suu Kyi’s is a betrayal that will hit the affected Rohingya ethnic minority hard; not least because the group are in desperate need of support from principled politicians, but also because her contentions - which will be taken seriously by many - were as false as they were cowardly.