Suu Kyi: Fake news is fuelling plight of Muslim refugees

AUNG San Suu Kyi made her first response yesterday to the outrage over Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslims.

The country’s defacto leader said the criticism after 146,000 fled to Bangladesh in the last fortnight was being fuelled by ‘a huge iceberg of misinformation’.

Her comments came after the UN led calls for her government to end violence as refugees told how soldiers are burning villages and committing murder and rape.

There has been growing international condemnation of the army’s response to ambushes by militants last month.

Miss Suu Kyi insisted that misinformation aimed ‘to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists’. She said her administration was ‘defending all the people’.

Myanmar’s Rohingya have lived under apartheid-like restrictions for years. They largely eschewed violence but a new militant group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army has launched a series of ambushes on border police, prompting the massive army-led crackdown.