Is Oxford University Complicit in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Genocide Denial?

Screen-shot of typical tweet.Recently, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was seen on Britain’s Channel 4 News directly confronting Win Myat Aye, the Minister for Social Welfare and Aung San Suu Kyi’s point man on the humanitarian crisis, during a visit to the affected Rohingya region of Western Myanmar.

Win Myat Aye was caught on camera repeating the official lie that “they (688,000 Rohingyas who fled to Bangladesh as the result of Myanmar military’s scorched earth “security clearance operations” since August) torched (their own villages)”.

Johnson’s incredulous and instant response was, “why would they do that”? Subsequently, the Foreign Secretary told the media that he believed Myanmar was putting out these “farcical tales” in order to cover up its “industrial scale ethnic cleansing”.

Setting standards?

When it comes to standards for truth-telling, politicians, government officials and political leaders are not the first people in the world that anyone would turn to.

However, when Oxford University – seen globally as a standard bearer in academic knowledge production and expected to uphold high standards of excellence in research, scholarship and publishing of intellectual integrity, factual accuracy and fairness in interpretation – finds itself peddling such a consistently false perspective, it is high time that the leadership of the University reviewed its institutional ties to Myanmar’s higher education sector.

On 29 January, the student-run Oxford Union devoted an evening of discussion on the subject of genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, S. Sudan and Myanmar during which 4 scholars and practitioners of international law and activism against genocides took part.

As the Burmese speaker on the panel, I thanked the Union and its bright, international, interested student audience for organizing and attending in large numbers a debate on subjects as grim and inhuman as these genocides. And I specifically called their attention to the complicity of Oxford University in my country’s on-going genocide of the Rohingya people.

Even the undergraduate students at St Hugh’s, Suu Kyi’s alma mater, voted to drop her name from their Junior Common Room and the college stored away her portrait, once hung proudly on its wall, into “a secure location” as of September 2017 while her government was accused of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

Oxford students have indeed consistently shown their humane concerns as well as intellectual curiosity about genocides, past and present. But their university ought to stop letting itself be used, wittingly or not, by individual scholars and experts whose denialist stance on the Rohingya, their identity, history and sufferings should be ground for the withdrawal of commissioned work, professional ties, and support.

By all the current indications, Suu Kyi will be unable to salvage her condemned name at the 11th hour of her political career. But the administration of the University of Oxford still have a chance to do the right thing and avoid being recorded in the annals of genocide as a by-stander at best, complicit at worst, in the ongoing Burmese genocide.

The statements and views mentioned in this article are the author’s and they do not necessarily represent those of Human Wrongs Watch.

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