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Canada has revoked the honorary citizenship of Aung San Suu Kyi, the latest in the many honors that have been taken from Myanmar's de facto leader since the military repression of the Rohingya Muslim minority last year.
The country's Senate voted to strip it of its honor on Tuesday, following the House of Commons vote on the approval of the same motion last week. Canada awarded this honor in 2007 and is the first to lose it.
Ratna Omidvar, the senator who introduced the motion, said that Aung San Suu Kyi's silence faced violence against the Rohingya, which killed several thousand people and sent over 700,000 people to the country. Rakhine State in Bangladesh, was to be sentenced.
The de facto leader of Myanmar has no power over the army, but a UN fact-finding mission in August concluded that Aung San Suu Kyi, a councilor of 39 State and Foreign Minister, "had not used his de facto position as head of government his moral authority to stem or prevent the events taking place in Rakhine State".
The body said that the main military generals of Myanmar should be investigated and prosecuted for genocide.
St Hugh's College at Oxford University, where the Myanmar leader studied, withdrew her portrait in 2017 after the crackdown on the Rohingya, and several other universities and cities revoked the honors granted during her years of detention. at home under a military regime.
In March, the US Holocaust Museum canceled a human rights award named after the late Elie Wiesel in 2012, saying it should have "done something to condemn and end the brutal campaign of the army and express its solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population ".
advisable
The Myanmar leader acknowledged last month that her government could have better managed the Rakhine crisis, but also spoke of the need to fight "terrorism" in Myanmar, echoing the justification by the military of crackdown on Rohingya armed militants, during which many civilians were raped. wounded or killed.
The Rohingyas have little popular sympathy in Buddhist majority Myanmar, where many support the nationalist line that they are illegal "immigrants" from Bangladesh.
Two years after taking power after an election that ended the direct military regime, Aung San Suu Kyi remains popular in the country, where she is known by the prestigious Daw Suu and commemorated as the daughter of the hero of the day. independence, Aung San.
However, his government has been criticized nationally for its management of the economy, its perception of corruption in business and political circles and for other problems.
Human rights organizations have sounded the alarm over intensifying prosecutions of journalists on charges since taking office in 2016, including two Reuters journalists sentenced to seven years in prison last month after their arrest while they reported the killing of 10 Rohingya men during the crackdown.
Speaking extensively for the first time in Hanoi last month of imprisonment, sentenced all over the world, she said they were not in prison for their journalistic work, but because a crime had found them guilty of violation of the Myanmar law on official secrets.
