Mahathir “lost all faith” in Myanmar’s Suu Kyi, ends support
Malaysia will no longer support the leadership of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi as a result of her handling of the Rohingya crisis in her country, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said in an interview with Turkish news channel TRT World at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 29.
He said that Suu Kyi seemed to be a “changed person” over the plight of the Rohingya people and that he “lost all faith in her.”
“Over this issue, she seems to be a changed person. She did not want to say anything against the action taken by the military against the Rohingya. So, we make it quite clear that we don’t really support her anymore,” he told host Ghida Fakhry.
Mahathir said that when Suu Kyi was under house arrest, Malaysia campaigned to get her released. But when he recently wrote a letter to Suu Kyi, he did not even receive a reply from her, and thus felt “very disappointed.”
He criticised the authorities in Myanmar and Suu Kyi directly for denying that the Rohingya people were being murdered, their homes torched and over a million refugees were forced to flee.
“Nations are independent, but does this mean that they have a right to massacre their own people?” he rhetorically asked.
“We have complained to the world about the treatment of the Rohingya. In fact, we have ourselves received quite a lot of Rohingya people in our country,” he said.
UN investigators have said that Myanmar’s military carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya with “genocidal intent”, and that its commander-in-chief and five generals should be prosecuted under international law.
Suu Kyi has also been heavily criticised for her failure to speak out against the treatment of the Rohingya by her country’s military. She has previously said that in hindsight, her government “could have handled it better,” referring to the Rohingya situation.
Within the Buddhist-majority country, however, many people see the issue through the lens of ethnic and religious sentiments, which had been worsened through a revised version of “national history” and public hate speeches of Buddhist monks. They have been influenced by years of rhetoric to be suspicious of Muslims and some regard the military action against the Rohingya as an operation against “terrorists.”
Malaysia will no longer support the leadership of Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi as a result of her handling of the Rohingya crisis in her country, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said in an interview with Turkish news channel TRT World at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 29. He said that Suu Kyi seemed to be a “changed person” over the plight of the Rohingya people and that he “lost all faith in her.” “Over this issue, she seems to be a changed person. She did not want to say anything against the action...
Malaysia will no longer support the leadership of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi as a result of her handling of the Rohingya crisis in her country, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said in an interview with Turkish news channel TRT World at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 29.
He said that Suu Kyi seemed to be a “changed person” over the plight of the Rohingya people and that he “lost all faith in her.”
“Over this issue, she seems to be a changed person. She did not want to say anything against the action taken by the military against the Rohingya. So, we make it quite clear that we don’t really support her anymore,” he told host Ghida Fakhry.
Mahathir said that when Suu Kyi was under house arrest, Malaysia campaigned to get her released. But when he recently wrote a letter to Suu Kyi, he did not even receive a reply from her, and thus felt “very disappointed.”
He criticised the authorities in Myanmar and Suu Kyi directly for denying that the Rohingya people were being murdered, their homes torched and over a million refugees were forced to flee.
“Nations are independent, but does this mean that they have a right to massacre their own people?” he rhetorically asked.
“We have complained to the world about the treatment of the Rohingya. In fact, we have ourselves received quite a lot of Rohingya people in our country,” he said.
UN investigators have said that Myanmar’s military carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya with “genocidal intent”, and that its commander-in-chief and five generals should be prosecuted under international law.
Suu Kyi has also been heavily criticised for her failure to speak out against the treatment of the Rohingya by her country’s military. She has previously said that in hindsight, her government “could have handled it better,” referring to the Rohingya situation.
Within the Buddhist-majority country, however, many people see the issue through the lens of ethnic and religious sentiments, which had been worsened through a revised version of “national history” and public hate speeches of Buddhist monks. They have been influenced by years of rhetoric to be suspicious of Muslims and some regard the military action against the Rohingya as an operation against “terrorists.”
