Myanmar’s Suu Kyi to be stripped of freedom of Paris award over Rohingya crackdown
The French capital Paris will strip Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi of her honorary freedom of the city in response to crimes committed against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo decided to revoke the honor because of the "multiple violations of human rights recorded in Myanmar and the violence and persecution by Myanmar's security forces against the Rohingya minority," the mayor’s spokeswoman said.
The announcement against the Noble prize laureate -- which follows similar decisions by the Scottish capital of Edinburgh and city of Glasgow, as well as British city of Oxford -- would make Myanmar's de facto leader the first person to lose the symbolic award of freedom of the French capital.
Hidalgo's office further stated that the mayor had written to Suu Kyi late last year to "express her concern and call for respect for the rights of the Rohingya minority," but that the letter received no response.
Suu Kyi has also been stripped of her honorary Canadian citizenship and the "Ambassador of Conscience Award" granted to her by the UK-based rights organization Amnesty International for her silence on the brutal massacre of Rohingya Muslims.
The officially-sanctioned atrocities against the Rohingya have been widely documented and reported by the UN and international human rights agencies.
More than 700,000 Rohingya have so far fled the violence in the Buddhist-majority East Asian country in 2017, mostly to neighboring Bangladesh.
A UN human rights commission has found evidence of widespread murder, rape, torture and arson and called for Myanmar’s top generals to be prosecuted for their roles in committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Thousands were killed, injured, arbitrarily arrested, or raped by Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist mobs mainly between November 2016 and August 2017, when the surviving members of the community started fleeing to Bangladesh en masse.
The Rohingya Muslims, who have lived in Myanmar for generations, are denied citizenship and branded illegal migrants from Bangladesh, which likewise denies them citizenship.
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