Asean’s code of non-interference benefits Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi as Rohingya crisis rolls on
When she attends the summit in Manila on Monday, the de facto leader will be counting on members to keep silent while her government cracks down on Muslims in Rakhine state
When Aung San Suu Kyi led the fight for democracy against Myanmar’s despotic military rulers two decades ago, she bristled at the collective reluctance of Southeast Asian governments to intervene in her nation’s plight.
In a newspaper editorial published in 1999, the former opposition leader slammed the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), saying its “policy of non-interference is just an excuse for not helping”.
“In this day and age,” she wrote in an editorial in Thailand’s The Nation newspaper on July 13 of that year, “you cannot avoid interference in the matters of other countries”.
Today, Suu Kyi leads Myanmar. And when she attends the Asean summit in Manila on Monday, she is likely to be counting on the bloc to keep silent while her government engages in a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims using tactics the UN has described as ethnic cleansing to force them to leave the Buddhist-majority country.
It is unclear whether the crisis will be on Asean’s official agenda, although Malaysia and Indonesia are likely to bring it up in talks on the meeting’s sidelines. Bangladesh, where more than 600,000 Rohingya have arrived since late August, is not part of Asean.
But little is expected to be done.