When Aung San Suu Kyi read the UN flash report on northern Rakhine, the Nobel peace laureate and de facto leader of Myanmar’s civilian government "seemed to be genuinely moved", the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein noted.
The document contains testimonies of babies having their throats slit, mass rapes, torture, and villages being razed to the ground. It paints a shocking picture of actions against the Muslim Rohingya population, which the UN said likely amounted to crimes against humanity. The report, issued on February 3 by UN OHCHR, suggested hundreds of people had been killed.
Yet Suu Kyi – who was already facing international criticism for her silence on the plight of the mainly stateless Rohingya – did not make any public statement reflecting the emotions reported by Al Hussein. Instead it was left to a spokesman for the president’s office to express concern over the "extremely serious allegations".
The report’s contents contradicted denials by the military and civilian government of almost all allegations of abuses since "clearance operations" were launched in northern Rakhine following assaults on border police posts on October 9, which left nine dead, claimed by a new insurgent group, Harakah al-Yakin. The group says it stands for Rohingya rights.
A government investigation was announced, with action promised if "clear evidence" of abuses is found – though as the investigation is being led by politicians with military links its impartiality has been questioned. Meanwhile clearance operations were recently declared to be at an end.
But the country’s long-awaited champion of democracy has again failed to speak out as a national leader, and questions are once again being asked of her commitment to human rights and relationship with the military.
In his award winning memoir From the Land of Green Ghosts, Pascal Khoo Thwe, of the Kayan Padaung minority, recalls Suu Kyi’s famous speech during the 1988 uprising when she declared she could not "as her father’s daughter, remain indifferent" to what was happening under military rule. Even the ethnic "rebels", he said, began to see her as the only person who could bring democracy to Myanmar, he wrote:
"Above all we saw someone expressing all our aspirations, confronting the regime and its gun barrels succinctly and eloquently and with not a hint of fear. At last we had found our leader, someone whom we trusted implicitly to restore the lost freedom of Burma …"
Was their trust in her leadership and courage unfounded?
When Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party swept to electoral victory in November 2015 it was heralded as the dawn of democracy in Myanmar after decades of military rule. Her government finally assumed power in April 2016, and, despite the military’s guaranteed 25 per cent of parliamentary seats and its continued control over constitutional change and key ministries, it was a time of great optimism for those who had fallen victim to the generals.
After all, this was the woman who, in her 1989 essay "In Quest for Democracy", declared: "It is undeniably easier to ignore the hardships of those who are too weak to demand their rights than to respond sensitively to their needs. To care is to accept responsibility, to dare to act in accordance with the dictum that the ruler is the strength of the helpless."
Now, almost a year after her government took the helm, faith that the Lady, as she’s widely known, will defend human rights and stand up against the military is fading for many, and her silence deafening on a number of key issues.
Few are more "helpless" than the stateless and those displaced by conflict.
"I am not going to go now into the extent to which she should have done more or less. There has to be some responsibility," the UN’s Al Hussein said to Reuters when the report was released.

Source: The National