Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s Mission to The Hague: Defending the Indefensible?
https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/commentary/daw-aung-san-suu-kyis-mission-hague-defending-indefensible.html
Irrawaddy's Aung Zaw, Myanmar's leading genocide-cheer-leading journalist, speaks on Aung San Suu Kyi, ICJ and Rohingyas.
His active promotion of the officially manufactured and popular view about Rohingya - that Rohingyas are "Bengali" migrants with "fake ethnic identity" and that any type of resistance by this group is "Islamicists" and "terrorists" - have been reported in the Financial Times and the Daily Beast.
I have also documented Irrawaddy's role in promoting the genocide of Rohingya people in our research publication here:
To those who do not follow Burmese language media, Aung Zaw is one of the most notorious genocidal cheer-leaders: he trashes Rohingya people as "Bengali" and intentionally framed as "terrorists" to his Burmese language audiences.
The potency of Aung Zaw's vile genocidal anti-Rohingya racism is such that even former Information Minister ex-Colonel Ye Htut came across as a mild, reasonable nationalist in their Burmese language Irrawaddy TV show following the 2017 "security clearance" operations against Rohingyas, which resulted in the survival run of 730,000 Rohingyas across the borders into Bangladesh.
To my amusement, Irrawaddy framed two Rohingya brothers of mine - Maung Tun Khin and Ro Nay San Lwin - and me as 3 lobbyists whom Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army or ARSA tags in their tweets as if we were a part of ARSA.
I have known Aung Zaw for 25 years. The brother, another editor at Irrawaddy, Kyaw Zwa Moe, was jailed for 10+ years for having participated in the 1988 student uprising in Rangoon. Aung Zaw fled the country to Mae Sot and later founded the Irrawaddy. I helped distribute early prints of Irrawaddy when I was a student activist in California as it was a dissident publication.
Their mother was hit and killed by a military truck on the street in Rangoon on her way to meeting the younger son at Insein jail.
Yet neither brother shows any signs of human rights as an internalized value nor compassion or empathy for the oppressed Rohingya.
Tragically, their vile genocidal racism on display with Irrawaddy journalists - Aung Zaw and Kyaw Zwa Moe - are only the tip of the berg. The brothers, both victims of Myanmar's military oppression, are not exceptions, but they are rather the norm of the 1988 Generation Students.
Virtually all leading members of the now defunct student leadership who cut their teeth in 1988 uprisings have turned genocidal towards the world's most persecuted community, and so has Aung San Suu Kyi.
To be blunt, I have, over the last 30 years, not expected a successful "Burmese or Myanmar Spring" resulting from the non-violent or violent student movements against the extremely organized Armed Forces of Myanmar used as the instrument of power and control by the ruthless and murderous militart leaders.
However, I did expect my fellow 88-generation activists who spent years - some almost 2 decades - behind fars or in exile - to at least demonstrate that when they bark human rights they mean it.
Alas, rabid nationalism, Islamophobia and political opportunism prove guide most of our political thoughts and calculations than any humanistic, liberal human rights or Buddhist values.
With spiritual and political leaders like Wirathu, Sitagu and Aung San Suu Kyi, another world is obviously not possible. Irrespective of where they work - in Chiang Mai or Yangon for crony-funded media outlets, or the world language services of USA and U, namely BBC Burmese, VOA Burmese or Radio Free Asia - the overwhelming majority of Myanmar journalists have been a part of our country's genocide.
Here is hoping that some of them will be named as genocide-complict cheer-leaders in either ICC or ad hoc genocide tribunals in the near future.
