Aung San Suu Kyi is a figure well-admired in Indonesia, as she is throughout the rest of the world. Or at least she was until a single controversial quote recently attributed to the National League for Democracy leader has led numerous Indonesians to express outrage at the Nobel Peace Prize winner online.
The quote?
“No one told me that I was to be interviewed by a Muslim.”
The statement was supposedly made by Suu Kyi after her interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain, herself a Muslim, in 2013. Suu Kyi allegedly said it off air after Husain asked her to condemn anti-Muslims in Myanmar and the persecution of the country’s Rohingya Muslims.
It’s certainly an uncharacteristic thing for Suu Kyi to say, and it’s all the more jarring given her status as a Nobel laureate.
Several human rights activists in Indonesia created a petition on Change.org in reaction to the quote, arguing that, “it might be one racially-insensitive sentence, but that was one sentence too many, and the meaning is too much for those who love peace.”
Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population.
The petition, which was created yesterday, is urging Norway’s Nobel Committee to rescind Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize (the peace prize is awarded in Norway while all others are given in Sweden). The petitioners also added that Suu Kyi and the NLD have also failed to take an official position on the human rights abuses experienced by hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims.
At the time of writing, more than 28,000 people have signed it.
But did Suu Kyi actually say the controversial sentence, or if she did, was it somehow misinterpreted?
As we noted before, the quote, which first appeared in British journalist Peter Popham’s new book, ‘The Lady and the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Freedom’, was poorly sourced, with the author describing it as gossip.
However, he later backed his reporting up, saying the comment was taken from a reliable source. He also said the issue was more complicated than the quote revealed.
The petitioners may be launching an exercise in futility. It is literally against the statutes of the Nobel Foundation to revoke an award.
Suu Kyi isn’t the first target of such a campaign. Most recently, campaigners wanted United States President Barack Obama to give back his prize on the somewhat persuasive logic that US troops had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
