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Canada’s Parliament Moves to Strip Honor for Myanmar’s Leader

Eleven years after Canada granted honorary citizenship to Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the House of Commons voted unanimously to revoke it.

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By
Ian Austen
, New York Times

Eleven years after Canada granted honorary citizenship to Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, the House of Commons voted unanimously to revoke it.

The action Thursday afternoon, which requires Senate approval to take effect, came a week after the House of Commons passed a motion declaring the treatment of Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar’s government to be genocide. Myanmar’s military is facing widespread allegations that it is carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, and the United Nations has recommended that its top commanders be tried for genocide.

“If you’re an accomplice of genocide, you won’t have honorary citizenship here,” Gabriel Ste-Marie, the opposition member of Parliament who put the motion forward, said after the vote.

Earlier in the House of Commons, Ste-Marie, a member of the separatist Bloc Québécois party, charged that the killings have “unfolded under the watchful eye of the de facto head of government: Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Suu Kyi, who was honored by Canada for her protracted effort to bring democracy to Myanmar, has avoided criticizing the military’s actions, which have caused an estimated 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh since August 2017. About 10,000 people have been killed in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, according to the United Nations.

Refugees have described fleeing nightmarish scenes of executions, rape and village burnings conducted by members of Myanmar’s military.

Last year, one woman at a camp in Bangladesh said soldiers pulled her infant son from her arms and flung him to his death in a fire before gang raping her. In addition to her son, she said, the military killed her mother, her two sisters and her younger brother.

Instead of challenging her military, Suu Kyi has often chided the rest of the world for, in her view, turning a blind eye to violent acts by armed Rohingya militants against members of other ethnic and religious groups in Rakhine. Local officials estimate about 50 people have died because of those attacks.

Over the past year, several politicians in Canada have called for revoking Suu Kyi’s citizenship, an honor that has been given to only six other people, including Nelson Mandela, the South African liberation hero, and, posthumously, Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

The vote Thursday was preceded by a suggestion from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Parliament could take the step.

“Whether she has citizenship or not doesn’t help the Rohingyas,” Trudeau told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Parliament granted her citizenship, Parliament can take it away. But we’re focused on the millions of people who are suffering either in place or as refugees.”

Canada’s Senate, which will not sit again until Tuesday, must now pass a similar motion before Suu Kyi’s citizenship can be annulled.

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