Amnesty International has withdrawn its Ambassador of Conscience award from Myanmar’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, after growing criticism of her response to the Rohingya crisis. The rights group said the decision reflected its view that she no longer embodied the values the honour was meant to recognise.
In a letter to Suu Kyi, Amnesty said: “We are profoundly dismayed that you no longer represent a symbol of hope, courage, and the undying defence of human rights.” The award is the organisation’s highest honour and has previously gone to figures including Nelson Mandela.
The withdrawal adds to a wider backlash against Suu Kyi’s international standing. Other institutions that once recognised her for human-rights work have already removed honorary citizenships, fellowships and city freedoms, while pressure is also building on the Nobel Committee to revoke the Nobel Peace Prize it awarded her in 1991.
Those reversals follow years of criticism over Suu Kyi’s conduct after she became Myanmar’s de facto leader in 2006. During that period, the Rohingya Muslim minority faced systematic violence, including killings, torture and what rights groups describe as ethnic cleansing.
The Rohingya have fled in large numbers into Bangladesh, where many now live in overcrowded camps under severe strain. Bangladesh, itself one of the world’s poorest countries, has struggled to absorb the pressure on water, land and basic social services.
For the Rohingya, the crisis has created a stateless existence between a country that rejects them and a homeland that does not accept them. Families have crossed difficult terrain in desperate conditions, with children, the sick and the elderly among those forced to flee.
Conditions in the refugee camps have been grim. Children born there face malnutrition and other poverty-related illnesses, schooling is limited, and girls have been vulnerable to kidnapping and trafficking, including to India, where some are sold into sexual slavery.
At her Nobel lecture in Norway, Suu Kyi had spoken forcefully about human rights, saying humanity could never fully eliminate evil but must keep resisting it. She also recalled refugees she had met in Thailand before her detention, who pleaded with her: “Don’t forget our plight, don’t forget we also belong to your world…”
She invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a defence of human dignity and freedom. But the treatment of the Rohingya has been described by critics as a direct contradiction of those principles, with allegations of torture, mass rape, disappearances and forced displacement.
Out of an estimated one million Rohingya in Myanmar, about 700,000 have been driven from the country, according to the report. The Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court classifies such abuses as crimes against humanity.
No one has accused Suu Kyi of being directly or indirectly involved in the crimes. The criticism has instead focused on her refusal to condemn the abuses clearly, or on her tendency to deflect or deny their scale.
That silence, critics say, has left the impression that the rights she championed were never meant to extend to the Rohingya. For them, the central charge is not only what has happened in Myanmar, but what she has chosen not to say.
Tee Ngugi is a social and political commentator based in Nairobi.
