WASHINGTON: Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a moral responsibility to try to ease tension between majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims, her fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama, said on Monday.
The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had stressed the issue in meetings with Suu Kyi, who came to power in April in the newly created role of state counsellor in Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in five decades.
“She already has the Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel Laureate, so morally she should ... make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” he told Reuters in an interview in Washington. “I actually told her she should speak more openly.” Violence between Buddhists and Muslims in recent years has cast a cloud over progress with democratic reforms in Myanmar. Rights groups have sharply criticized Suu Kyi’s reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya’s plight.
The Dalai Lama said Suu Kyi, who won worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize as a champion of democratic change in the face of military persecution, had responded to his calls by saying that the situation was “really complicated.”
“So I don’t know,” he said.
There is widespread hostility toward Rohingya Muslims in the Buddhist-majority country, including among some within Suu Kyi’s party and its supporters.
More than 100 people were killed in violence in western Rakhine state in 2012, and some 125,000 Rohingya Muslims, who are stateless, took refuge in camps where their movements are severely restricted.
Dalai Lama tells Suu Kyi to ease Rohingya tension
Dalai Lama tells Suu Kyi to ease Rohingya tension
Philippine lawmakers start VP Duterte impeachment hearings
- The revived impeachment bid leans heavily on allegations that the younger Duterte misused public funds
MANILA: A Philippine congressional committee began impeachment hearings Monday that could dash Vice President Sara Duterte’s run for the country’s top job.
The daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who recently announced her candidacy for the 2028 presidential election, was impeached by the country’s House of Representatives last year only to see the Supreme Court toss the case out over procedural issues.
The revived impeachment bid leans heavily on allegations that the younger Duterte misused public funds while in office and will see the House justice committee debate three such complaints.
A fourth case was dropped by complainants who hoped to speed up the process.
Duterte also stands accused of making a death threat against her former ally and current President Ferdinand Marcos, with whom she is engaged in an explosive political feud.
Under the Philippine constitution, an impeachment triggers a Senate trial. A guilty verdict would result in Duterte being barred from politics and sidelined from the 2028 presidential race.
The latest impeachment bid faces a changed environment with the vice president ahead in recent polls, analysts told AFP.
“The political context will be very different, especially now that Sara declared her candidacy,” University of the Philippines political science professor Jean Franco said.
“It’s definitely going to weigh on the minds of the members of the House of Representatives,” Franco said, adding that a vote for impeachment would effectively see a lawmaker’s career “marked for death.”
Anthony Lawrence Borja, an associate professor of political science at De La Salle University agreed saying: “It is ultimately a question of whether the patronage of the current administration outweighs their fear of Duterte’s condemnation.”
The same committee hearing the case against Duterte last month tossed out a pair of impeachment complaints against Marcos, ruling that allegations of corruption over a scandal involving bogus flood control projects lacked substance.
Michael Wesley Poa, spokesman for Duterte’s defense team, told AFP they were closely monitoring deliberations and trusted “the same standards” used in the Marcos hearing would be applied.
