MYANMAR leader Aung San Suu Kyi has decided to become personally involved in the genocide lawsuit at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The Gambia, on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, filed the charges last week. There was widespread surprise when she announced she would be leading the Myanmar legal team to the court in The Hague. She has no formal legal training. Her degrees were politics, economics and philosophy. This deeply-tarnished Nobel Peace Laureate appears to be intent on using her once-lofty reputation to argue in court that there was no genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state and there was no ethnic cleansing. It would be a neat trick if she could persuade the judges that approaching a million Rohingya moved voluntarily to refugee camps in Bangladesh, after having first burned down their own houses and destroyed their businesses. It is really hard to see how this formerly revered international figure can argue against the brutal reality of what has happened to the Rohingya. There are two possible lines of defense, both likely to prove unsatisfactory. The first is that the shadowy members of her former oppressors, the old military junta who still control key security ministries, were beyond her control. There was nothing that she might have done to challenge their barbarous behavior, not least because the armed forces still have the power to reverse Myanmar's uneasy democratic establishment. The second plea could be to repeat her government's argument that the Rohingya are not in fact Myanmar citizens and had no right to be in the country. This of course flies in the face of the facts. The Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for many generations but since the end of British rule, were never accorded their rights as citizens nor equality under the law. She is almost sure to regret the violence but insist that it was caused by Buddhist fanatics whom the police and army struggled to control. She may even claim that the Rohingya initiated the violence themselves, pointing to armed bands who in recent years have indeed been mounting revenge attacks on the security forces. She is bound to claim again that the squalid concentration camps into which large parts of the community were herded, were in fact set up for their own protection. The question of course, that she will find hardest to answer is why, despite her government's agreement to allow the Rohingya to return with guarantees of their safety, virtually has none has been prepared to accept the offer. Aung San Suu Kyi is in reality setting out to defend the indefensible. Her personal involvement is a high-risk strategy, which seems bound to end in humiliation and failure. So why is she doing this? It seems possible that "The Lady", as she was once affectionately known, is suffering from delusions of grandeur. She imagines that she can still call on the massive goodwill that she once enjoyed around the world. Since the Islamophobic depravities in Rakhine state, she has been stripped of international prizes, including honorary Canadian citizenship and Amnesty International's "Ambassador of Conscience" award. Mysteriously, she still holds the most prestigious recognition of all, the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps when the ICJ trial lays open the enormity of the Rohingya persecution, this too will be finally stripped from her.
