In August the United Nations accused the Myanmar military of committing genocide against the Rohingya in Rakhine state. No one outside the country seriously doubts that a slaughter of innocents last August sent more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh. However, rather than prosecute the criminals, those being sent to jail are the journalists who exposed the crime. This week a judge handed out seven-year jail terms to two Burmese journalists working for the Reuters news agency who had been investigating the killings of Rohingya men found in a mass grave.
This is straight from the pages of Kafka: the pair were convicted of a colonial-era crime to spend years behind bars. It is absurd that the government has not stepped in to stop this farce of a trial in the nine months it ran. No one denies that the massacre that the Reuters team were looking into happened. The army admitted some officials were involved. What is tragic is that Aung San Suu Kyi, who leads the Myanmar government and won the Nobel peace prize in 1991 for campaigning for democracy, has remained silent on this issue and the bloody crackdown in Rakhine state. She should have stepped down from office in protest at the blood being spilt in her government’s name. Plainly, Aung San Suu Kyi calculates that she would do more good in office, though the evidence of this is thin. It looks as if she is being used as a human shield for the military’s murderous campaign against a Muslim minority. As the UN said, the government’s omissions have contributed to the commission of the gravest crimes.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2oEFFmx
via
0 Comments