Rohingya Issue: Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi Disappointed with Suu Kyi

Expressing his disappointment with Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s stand on the Rohingya issue, Indian Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi said the situation is among this “era’s biggest humanitarian crises”.

The way Myanmar government is handling the crisis is “bad and unacceptable”, Satyarthi said on Sept. 23, the Associated Press reported. “Almost the entire Nobel Peace laureate community is hugely disappointed with our fellow Nobel laureate Suu Kyi. We have written to her,” he added

Satyarthi made the comments during a campaign tour of Assam to spread awareness against child abuse.

“The politics aside, it is a humanitarian crisis of gigantic proportions and Suu Kyi has to deal with that from that perspective,” the children’s rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 along with Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, said.

More than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims are reported to have fled the violence-marred Myanmar’s Rakhine province to neighboring country Bangladesh in the past month.

Amnesty International recently said that the new videos taken from the state show smoke rising from Rohingya Muslim Villages. The fires captured in the images and videos were started by members of the Myanmar security forces and the vigilante, the organization added, which contradicts Aung San Suu Kyu’s statements that the military’s so-called “clearance operations” ended on Sept. 5.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asia Patrick Murphy told Washington Post that the response from Myanmar’s security forces to attacks by Muslim Rohingya militants in late August was “disproportionate”.