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BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

Demise of an Icon

Shamsad Mortuza
For Aung San Suu Kyi, December 10
could have been a date to remember. It is the day when she received her Nobel Prize in 1991. Each year on December 10, on the death anniversary of
the inventor Alfred Nobel, individuals
in five categories are honoured for their outstanding services. In his will, Alfred Nobel desired that one-fifth of the interest
of his trust fund would be given to "the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses." In 1991, Suu Kyi fitted the bill for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was even dubbed by Time magazine as one of the "Children of Gandhi" (1999) for her commitment to non-violence. For long, almost 21 years, she had been the caged bird as a political prisoner who served as a beacon of hope for freedom-loving people around the world. As the daughter of Myanmar*s independence hero General Aung San, an Oxford graduate married to a Westerner, and an ex-UN employee— Suu Kyi had been the darling of the mainstream media.
However, in recent years, the world has woken up to her new avatar. The "sound" of her silence over the Rohingya massacre of genocidal proportions and its stated desire of ethnic cleansing is eerie, shocking and disturbing. It seems there are two Aung San Suu Kyis: one from pre-2015 and another from post-201 5 election. The first one could have sipped tea while ruminating on her Nobel memory on December 10, while the other one had been brought to the International Court of Justice (1CJ) in The Hague. The Gambia, a small African country, remotely connected with the violence, summoned the Southeast Asian songbird Suu Kyi to a court in Europe for "singing from a different song sheet" ever since her landslide win in the national election. In the last few years, there have been numerous calls to revoke Suu Kyi's Nobel Prize, of which she is arguably no longer worthy; the Nobel committee disagreed.
But the matter at hand is graver than a mere shiny trinket. The Gambia'sany Western power that prefers building walls or dealing with the refugee-seekers off-shore and deporting them at the first available opportunity, situates itself on a moral high ground. The moral compass is changing. Both Bangladesh and Gambia have expressed their national memory of experiencing genocide. Bangladesh is a grateful country as it wanted to reciprocate the humanitarian gesture that it received in 1971 from India which once sheltered 10 million refugees. The difference is: those "Joy Bangla" refugees knew at heart that they would be returning to an independent country. They had the hope because their freedom-fighting sons and daughters were waging a guerrilla warfare, while their host country was garnering international support for their winning cause
The Rohingyas are devoid of any such hope. They have not been officially given the refugee status, which would make Bangladesh government liable for all social services and citizen rights. The donors, meanwhile, are acting like hospital emergency services dealing with patients without insurance policies. They
surprised to see her repeating a rehearsed position: that Myanmar is investigating some instances of excessive force used by her army. Suu Kyi painted the Rohingya victims as the collateral damage of an army action engaged in diffusing insurgency. The General's daughter's position will surely instil more fear in the Rohingya people who now will have all the more reasons to protest any possible attempt to relocate them to what used to be their homeland.
Suu Kyi, articulate as she is, will use her words to silence the narrative of trauma and violence. She will convolute the discourse to prolong the repatriation process, and eventually make the Rohingya issue a problem and liability of Bangladesh alone. I remember one Israeli minister once saying on TV—"Who said that the Palestinians do not have a country; they have Jordan and Syria." I think we are going to hear a similar undertone in the official Myanmar narrative. Already, by giving China access to the Indian Ocean through Kyaukphyu deep sea port and the building of the Special Economic Zone in the Rakhine
will also point out how Bangladesh is being affected by another type of collateral damage: the heritage site of Cox's Bazar. Our ecology is threatened, our tourism industry is in disarray, and the local residents are seeing their poverty and rights being ignored at the expense of some sponsored guests.
Sitting in the comfort zone of my reading room, and trying to make sense of the world while surfing through the net or watching TV, can only lead me to a wall of silence. The shadow lines of the Gambia-the Netherlands-Bangladesh-Myanmar can remind one of the author Amitav Ghosh, who wrote, "I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words—that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all."
In this month of Victory, let me echo Ghosh, and say, "this silence [too] must win."Shamsad Mortuza Is Professor of English, University of Dhaka (now on leave). Currently, he is Pro-Vice-Chancellor of ULAB.
Email: shamsad71@hotmail.com