A Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Shame<br />“We applauded Aung San Suu Kyi when she received her Nobel Prize<br />because she symbolized courage in the face of tyranny,” noted Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.<br />“They’re killing children,” Matthew Smith, the chief executive of a human rights group<br />called Fortify Rights, told me after interviewing refugees on the Bangladesh border.<br />Aung San Suu Kyi, a beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner, is presiding over an ethnic<br />cleansing in which villages are burned, women raped and children butchered.<br />They killed my husband by bullet.”<br />Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the widow who defied Myanmar’s dictators, endured a total of 15 years of house arrest<br />and led a campaign for democracy, was a hero of modern times.<br />For the last three weeks, Buddhist-majority Myanmar has systematically slaughtered civilians belonging to the Rohingya Muslim minority,<br />forcing 270,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh — with Myanmar soldiers shooting at them even as they cross the border.<br />Yet today Daw Suu, as the effective leader of Myanmar, is chief apologist for this ethnic cleansing, as the country oppresses the darker-skinned Rohingya<br />and denounces them as terrorists and illegal immigrants.
