The world is clearly now supposed to believe that the wicked campaign of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar is not the policy of the government of the deeply-tarnished Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. A military court has just jailed seven soldiers, including four officers, for the murder of 10 Rohingya Muslims. The killers have each been given 10 years hard labor.
The trial has clearly been forced to take place in the face of overwhelming evidence that the police and military had been actively involved in murder, rape and robbery in Rakhine state. These were crimes that were calculated to spread terror amongst the local Muslim population. As a result some 700,000 Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh. There they barely survive in sprawling and overcrowded refugee camps where they are prey to disease because of insanitary conditions. But for all those who have deserted their houses, these awful surroundings are better than the mayhem and carnage that they left behind when they abandoned their livelihoods in their towns and villages back home in Myanmar.
There are two significant factors to this trial of the seven soldiers. The first is that there has been no sort of censure for their ultimate commanders. Just as importantly, there has been no prosecution of the Buddhist militants who were a key part of this hate-filled campaign. It must be wondered what sort of punishment these seven men will actually suffer in the military stockade to which they have been sent. Doubtless among the soldiers who guard them, they will be treated with the greatest sympathy, if not indeed indulgence. It is by no means unlikely that, after a decent period of time, they will quietly be allowed to return to their military duties. Therefore, this trial was, from the outset, a farce that should fool no one.
Clear evidence that Aung San Suu Kyi is in no way genuinely seeking to right even part of the terrible Islamophobic wrongs that have been committed on her watch is the fact that the two Reuters journalists whose investigation into massacres uncovered the crimes of the seven soldiers are still to stand trial. Shortly after the army killers were convicted, another court ruled that the two young reporters, Wa Lone, 32 and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, would be tried for violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act. They were arrested last December accused of possessing material relating to the security operations in Rakhine State.
Reuters has protested that the two journalists were only doing their job. There has been an international outcry at their detention and their defense team now includes leading international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney. It remains to be seen if the case against these men will be conducted in a fair and transparent manner. There have to be serious doubts that this will be so.
Given that it was the journalists’ fearless reporting in the midst of the murderous chaos of the massacres that exposed the crimes of these seven soldiers, it might have been imagined that they would have been released with the thanks of Aung San Suu Kyi’s regime. The fact that exactly the opposite has happened does not bode well.
Unstable regimes always seek to shoot the messenger because they do not want to hear the news that they bring, not least because they already know that it is true.
