UN OFFICIAL CALLS SUU KYI ‘FIG LEAF FOR ATROCITIES’
Myanmar leader criticized over Rohingya crisis
LONDON • A leading United Nations human rights investigator has criticized Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, for acting as a “fig leaf for military atrocities” against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
In an interview ahead of Tuesday’s release of a 400-page report on alleged “genocidal” crimes, Australian lawyer Chris Sidoti said that Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate and honorary Canadian citizen, could not escape responsibility for failing to act over the violence.
‘The report, by three independent experts including Sidoti, provides the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva with harrowing details of mass killings and rape by Myanmar’s military that prompted more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh last year.
“The very first thing she could have done was not provide cover for the military by dismissing the overwhelming number of reports of mass rape as fake,” Sidoti said.
“She could have refused to provide a fig leaf for military atrocities of the most serious kind … she has enormous moral authority, she won 80 per cent of the popular vote in the 2015 election.”
The presentation of the final investigation to the Swiss-based council will mark a crucial step on the long road to obtaining justice for thousands who lost their lives or their homes or who were brutalized during the merciless operation by Myanmar’s troops.
A preliminary report released last month by Sidoti, Marzuki Darusman, Indonesia’s former attorney general, and Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan lawyer and women’s rights expert, called for Myanmar’s senior generals to be prosecuted for genocide.
Based on 875 interviews with victims and eyewitnesses plus satellite imagery, it documents the shooting and stabbing of children, the scorching of Rohingya villages and gang rape on an enormous scale.
Sidoti told The Telegraph: “The level of trauma in the camps in Bangladesh is beyond anything I have ever seen.”
Last month, the Myanmar government dismissed the UN investigators’ findings as “false allegations.” However, the UN panel has recommended a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague as an option, which has already won support from some quarters.