The museum announced on Wednesday that it had withdrawn the Elie Wiesel award, presented to Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012. Officials cited her refusal to condemn or stop the mass killings of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority.
Aung San Suu Kyi had earned comparisons to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela after spending 15 years under house arrest for opposing the country’s military dictatorship. She became an international lodestar and won the Nobel peace prize in 1991.
Her party won a landslide victory in 2015 and she became state counsellor. In response, Barack Obama relaxed sanctions, gave financial assistance and became the first sitting US president to visit Myanmar.
But Aung San Suu Kyi’s international reputation has collapsed over the Rohingya massacres and she has been criticised as an apologist for the purges. She has not even spoken the word Rohingya in public.
Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum, explained its reasoning in an open letter to the Myanmar embassy in Washington that was published on the museum’s website.
“Based on inspiration that you created for millions around the world, with your long resistance to military dictatorship, and your advocacy for freedom and human rights for all the people of Myanmar, we were honored to present you with the first Elie Wiesel Award in 2012,” Bloomfield wrote. “It is with great regret that we are now rescinding that award. We did not take this decision lightly.”
The museum has been “closely monitoring” the Myanmar military’s campaign against the Rohingya and Aung San Suu Kyi’s response to it, Bloomfield continued, making “numerous visits” to Myanmar and Bangladesh to obtain firsthand evidence. The museum has also published findings that include “mounting evidence of genocide”.
Source: theguardian
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