Ex-N.M. governor quits refugee panel

YANGON, Burma — New Mexico’s former governor, Bill Richardson, has resigned from an international advisory panel on the Rohingya refugee crisis, calling it a “whitewash and a cheerleading operation” for Burma leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

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

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and 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 Burma.

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

Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that military authorities adopted in 1989. Some nations, such as the United States and Britain, have refused to adopt the name change.

AP/MANISH SWARUP A Rohingya refugee boy, who was staying in no-man’s land at Bandarban between the Burma and Bangladesh border, clings to his father after arriving Wednesday at Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Richardson