Myanmar’s de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi will not be stripped off her Nobel Peace Prize, despite reports in United Nations claiming that Myanmar’s military was involved in the mass killings of Rohingya Muslims, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Wednesday.
Reportedly, the U.N. investigators came to a draw that the Myanmar military carried out mass killings and gang rapes with “genocidal intent” and called for the nation’s commander-in-chief and five army generals to be prosecuted under the international law of crime.
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Aung San, who leads the Myanmar government as the State Counsellor and is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991 for her fight for independence and democracy was also criticised by the UN for failing to speak against the army’s genocidal treatment of the Rohingya Muslims.
“It’s important to remember that a Nobel Prize, whether in Physics, Literature or Peace, is awarded for some prize-worthy effort or achievement of the past,” said Olav Njoelstad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee was quoted as saying by NDTV.
“Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for democracy and freedom up until 1991, the year she was awarded the prize,” he added. And the rules regulating the Nobel Prizes do not allow for a prize to be withdrawn.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee which consists of a panel of five Norwegians, most of whom are former politicians and academics.
Despite the Myanmar leader receiving wide criticisms for staying during the Rohingya massacre, Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Nobel Committee in Norway had reiterated that Aung San Suu Kyi would not be stripped of the award.
“We don’t do it. It’s not our task to oversee or censor what a laureate does after the prize has been won,” she said in a television interview. “The prize winners themselves have to safeguard their own reputations,” he had said last year.