Terrorists behind ‘iceberg’ of fake news: Suu Kyi
MYANMAR: Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader, has lashed out at an ‘‘iceberg of misinformation’’ from ‘‘terrorists’’ - amid reports that the army has laced the border with Bangladesh with landmines to stop refugees fleeing the military from later returning home.
Nearly 150,000 civilians from the Rohingya Muslim minority have fled the state of Rakhine to neighbouring Bangladesh over the past two weeks, bringing allegations of mass killings of civilians and the torching of their villages by Myanmar security forces.
More than 400 have been killed, Myanmar officials said, but human rights activists claimed that at least 1000 have died. According to several reports, about 130 people, including women and children, were slaughtered in just one village, Chut Pyin.
The army ‘‘clearing operation’’, which was sparked when Rohingya insurgents ambushed paramilitary checkpoints on August 25, could lead to genocide, a senior UN official warned on Wednesday.
‘‘When they are being killed and forcibly transferred in a widespread or systematic manner, this could constitute ethnic cleansing and could amount to crimes against humanity,’’ UN special adviser for the prevention of genocide Adama Dieng said.
‘‘In fact, it can be the precursor to all the egregious crimes - and I mean genocide,’’ he said.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also joined the chorus of international concern about serious abuses against the Rohingya. ‘‘Civilians must be protected,’’ he tweeted.
Thousands of Indonesian Muslims chanting ‘‘Allahu akbar’’ protested in central Jakarta on Wednesday over Myanmar’s treat- ment of the Rohingya.
But despite mounting criticism of her regime, Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prize winner who lived under house arrest for years and is a symbol of Myanmar’s democratic transition, has made no mention of the plight of Rohingya civilians. Instead, she has blamed ‘‘terrorists’’ for ‘‘a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different countries’’. She made the accusation in a telephone conversation on Tuesday with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has accused Myanmar of genocide.
On Wednesday a Myanmar military source denied Bangladeshi government accusations that soldiers had been laying landmines along the border over the past three days. - Telegraph Group