A former Carleton student has started a petition to revoke the honourary Canadian citizenship awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar, after accusations that she failed to speak out about military violence against minority groups in her home country.
Fareed Khan, who was a public policy graduate student at Carleton, has launched an online petition addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, asking him to rescind Suu Kyi’s honourary Canadian citizenship. Since its release on Sept. 4, the petition has received more than 13,000 signatures of its 15,000 goal.
Though Suu Kyi was previously regarded as a symbol of peace and democracy, her failure to condemn the ongoing violence committed against the Rohingya Muslim minority of Myanmar by the country’s military forces has sparked international outrage.
According to the New York Times, Myanmar does not consider the Rohingya to be citizens, leaving them effectively stateless. Since the violence began again in August, more than 370,000 Rohingya have fled the country into neighbouring Bangladesh, according to the Times.
Among her long list of accolades, Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, honourary Canadian citizenship in 2007, and an honourary doctorate of law from Carleton in 2011.
Khan said he wants to raise awareness about the violence in Myanmar and galvanize the Canadian government to take action.
“The Myanmar government is trying to erase the existence of the Rohingya from its society, and I can’t believe that with the reports that are coming out from human rights groups, with the reports that are coming out from people on the ground, that we in the West can take our time to deal with this,” he said. “Soon is not soon enough, it needs to happen yesterday.”
Nur Hasim, the chairman of the Canadian Burmese Rohingya Organization, said in a Facebook message that he agreed Suu Kyi should be stripped of her Canadian citizenship, calling the situation in Myanmar a “grave gross-human rights violation by the Burmese military and security forces.”
Other petitions have been created calling for Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize to be rescinded. However, the Norwegian Nobel Institute has stated that Alfred Nobel’s will nor the Nobel Foundation’s rules allow for laureates to be stripped of the honour once it has been awarded.
According to Khan, a group of Carleton alumni will be appealing to the university to strip Suu Kyi of her honourary doctorate.
Kathy McKinley, the secretary of Carleton’s Board of Governors and Senate, said in an email that Suu Kyi’s honourary doctorate was given to recognize her “distinguished contribution to people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means.”
According to McKinley, while her office is aware of the desire in the community for Carleton to revoke Suu Kyi’s doctorate, such a motion would be unprecedented.
“Currently there is no policy in [the] Senate regarding revoking an honourary degree,” she stated.
McKinley said the university is “monitoring the situation” regarding the group of alumni’s impending request to revoke Suu Kyi’s doctorate.
Khan explained that while Suu Kyi may have merited the many honours awarded to her in the past, her current inaction indicates that her prestige is no longer deserved.
“The justification that the government gave at the time that she received the award [citizenship] was that she embodied the ideals of democracy, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. Now we look at what’s happening, and those ideals are nowhere to be found,” Khan said.
Photo by Angela Tilley
