Just as Suu Kyi dismisses allegations of Myanmar’s international human
rights crimes as designed to tarnish the image of Myanmar, the
administration at Oxford University considers this a “public
relations” issue.
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When it comes to standards for truth-telling, politicians, government
officials and political leaders are not the first people in the world
that anyone would turn to. However, when Oxford University – seen
globally as a standard bearer in academic knowledge production and
expected to uphold high standards of excellence in research,
scholarship and publishing of intellectual integrity, factual accuracy
and fairness in interpretation – finds itself peddling such a
consistently false perspective, it is high time that the leadership of
the University reviewed its institutional ties to Myanmar’s higher
education sector.
On 29 January, the student-run Oxford Union devoted an evening of
discussion on the subject of genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, S. Sudan
and Myanmar during which 4 scholars and practitioners of international
law and activism against genocides took part. As the Burmese speaker
on the panel, I thanked the Union and its bright, international,
interested student audience for organizing and attending in large
numbers a debate on subjects as grim and inhuman as these genocides.
And I specifically called their attention to the complicity of Oxford
University in my country’s on-going genocide of the Rohingya people.
Even the undergraduate students at St Hugh’s, Suu Kyi’s alma mater,
voted to drop her name from their Junior Common Room and the college
stored away her portrait, once hung proudly on its wall, into “a
secure location” as of September 2017 while her government was accused
of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
Oxford students have indeed consistently shown their humane concerns
as well as intellectual curiosity about genocides, past and present.
But their university ought to stop letting itself be used, wittingly
or not, by individual scholars and experts whose denialist stance on
the Rohingya, their identity, history and sufferings should be ground
for the withdrawal of commissioned work, professional ties, and
support.
By all the current indications, Suu Kyi will be unable to salvage her
condemned name at the 11th hour of her political career. But the
administration of the University of Oxford still have a chance to do
the right thing and avoid being recorded in the annals of genocide as
a by-stander at best, complicit at worst, in the ongoing Burmese
genocide.
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Read the full text of my op-ed here:
