Vatican defends pope against criticism over Rohingya stance
YANGON, Myanmar — The Vatican on Wednesday defended Pope Francis after human rights groups expressed disappointment he didn’t publicly acknowledge the plight of Rohingya Muslims, who have been subject to what the United Nations has termed a campaign of “textbook ethnic cleansing” by Myanmar’s military.
Spokesman Greg Burke said Francis took seriously the advice given to him by the local Catholic Church, which urged him to toe a cautious line and not even refer to the “Rohingya” by name during his trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh, since the majority of people
in Myanmar reject the term because the ethnic group is not a recognized minority in the country.
“The moral authority of the pope stands,” Burke
asserted Wednesday. “You can criticize what’s said, what’s not said, but the pope is not going to lose moral authority on this question here.”
Burke spoke as Francis neared the midpoint of his weeklong trip, which was in the works well before the Myanmar military launched what it called “clearance operations” in Rakhine state in response to attacks by a group of Rohingya militants against security positions in August. The campaign, denounced by the U.N. and the U.S. as “ethnic cleansing,” has forced more than 620,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh in the worst Asian refugee crisis in decades. Rohingya in the camps have reported entire villages in Myanmar being burned and looted and women and girls raped.
Burke noted that the Holy See had only recently established diplomatic relations with Myanmar, that the Catholic Church in the country was small, and that the Holy See’s broader gains were to “build bridges” with the predominantly Buddhist nation as it emerges from decades of military dictatorship.
“Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Vatican diplomacy is not infallible,” Burke said. At the same time, he stressed that Francis’ diplomatic stance in public in Myanmar didn’t negate what he had said in the past, or what he might be saying in private.
In the past, Francis has strongly condemned the “persecution of our Rohingya brothers,” denounced their suffering because of their faith and called for them to receive “full rights.” And he has defined his papacy by his outspoken defense of refugees and advocacy for society’s most marginal and disenfranchised. While he called in his first major speech on Tuesday for all of Myanmar’s ethnic groups to have their human rights respected, his failure to specify the Rohingya crisis on Myanmar soil drew criticism from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Rohingya themselves.
Myanmar’s government and most of the Buddhist majority say the members of the Muslim minority are “Bengalis” who migrated illegally from Bangladesh and don’t acknowledge them as a local ethnic group even though they have lived in Myanmar, also known as Burma, for generations.