Professor Catherine Powell wrote a blog post about the absence of Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi from the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, following the recent brutal campaign by the Myanmar military against the Muslim Rohingya, a ethnic and religious minority in the country.
Of the few female leaders appearing at the opening of the GA, one is notably missing: Myanmar’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. While research suggests that women’s leadership is correlated with more sustainable peace and greater economic development, we of course cannot always assume that powerful women will lead in ways that guarantee peace, prosperity, and respect for human rights.
Having famously won the Noble Peace prize in 1991 for her non-violent efforts to promote free elections and human rights in her home country, Suu Kyi is now leading a government responsible for some of the worst atrocities the world faces as it heads into the UNGA’s annual opening. New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristoff, rightly describes the situation as shameful. While not the formal president of Myanmar, Suu Kyi is the country’s de facto leader. (She is constitutionally barred from the presidency because her children are foreign nationals, so her official title is “state counsellor.”)
Despite claims that the military is, in response, targeting terror suspects, the military appears to have indiscriminately attacked Rohingya civilians, regardless of their connection to any terrorist activity. Myanmar soldiers have reportedly burned homes, shot fleeing civilians, beheaded children, and raped women. Entire villages have been destroyed, and the violence has forced 379,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh in the last month alone, where they are encountering land mines allegedly planted by the Myanmar military to prevent them from returning.