‘Suu Kyi should have resigned’

BANGKOK: Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi should have resigned as Myanmar’s de facto leader over last year’s brutal army campaign against the Rohingya, the outgoing United Nations human rights chief told the BBC.

A military crackdown in response to attacks by Rohingya militants drove 700,000 of the Muslim minority from Rakhine State into Bangladesh, where they have given accounts of widespread rape, murder and arson targeting their villages.

Suu Kyi, once lionised as a defender of human rights, has been pilloried outside her country for failing to speak up for the Rohingya or condemn the army.

Instead, as streams of desperate Rohingya fled, Suu Kyi suggested an “iceberg of misinformation” had obscured the real picture of what had taken place in Rakhine and backed the army campaign as a justified response to “terrorist” acts.

“She was in a position to do something,” UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told the British broadcaster in an interview.

“She could have stayed quiet — or even better, she could have resigned.

“There was no need for her to be the spokesperson of the Burmese military. She didn’t have to say this was an iceberg of misinformation. These were fabrications.”

His stinging comments intensify days of damning criticism of Myanmar and its civilian and military leaders from the UN.

He said Suu Kyi should have leveraged her status in Myanmar to defang the military operation against the Rohingya, or resigned, instead of effectively acting as a cloak for their actions.