Suu Kyi’s ally quits board over Rohingya crisis

YANGON (AP) — Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has resigned from an advisory panel on the massive Rohingya refugee crisis, calling it a “whitewash and a cheerleading operation” for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The sudden resignation Wednesday of probably the panel’s most prominent member, a former senior US politician and diplomat who considered Suu Kyi a close friend, raises serious questions about international efforts to deal with the calamitous fallout of Myanmar military operations since August against the Rohingya Muslims that the United Nations has called “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

It also offers possible insight into the thinking of Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate once revered as an icon of human rights whose leadership during the Rohingya crisis has shocked many outsiders.

Richardson, a former US ambassador to the United Nations and former president Bill Clinton’s energy secretary, castigated Suu Kyi for blaming outsiders for the crisis instead of looking honestly at military actions that have forced nearly 700,000 Rohingya to flee to squalid refugee camps in Bangladesh, where they have spoken of mass killings, rapes and the obliteration of whole villages in Myanmar.

“She believes there’s a concerted international effort against Myanmar, and I believe she is wrong,” Richardson said Wednesday evening in an AP interview at his hotel in Yangon, the country’s biggest city.