Suu Kyi slammed in
Key member critical as he quits panel set up to address Rohingya crisis
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 Burma’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
The sudden resignation 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 Burmese 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 UN 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, also known as Myanmar.
“She believes there’s a concerted international effort against Myanmar, and I believe she is wrong,” Richardson said in an AP interview at his hotel in downtown Rangoon, the country’s biggest city. “She blames all the problems that Myanmar is having on the international media, on the UN, on human rights groups, on other governments, and I think this is caused by the bubble that is around her, by individuals that are not giving her frank advice.”
The 10-member advisory board is meant to implement earlier Rohingya recommendations made by a group led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, but Richardson said Suu Kyi appears to want the board to validate her Rohingya policies.
“The advisory board is mainly a whitewash and a cheerleading operation for the Myanmar Government, and I’m not going to be part of it because I think there are serious issues of human rights violations, safety, citizenship, peace and stability that need to be addressed,” Richardson said. “I just felt that my advice and counsel would not be heeded.”
A spokesman for Burma’s Government said it was sorry about Richardson’s resignation.
“The reason why we formed the advisory commission was because we hoped that the team will give us constructive support and advice,” spokesman Zaw Htay said in Naypyitaw. “We are sorry that Bill Richardson is releasing a statement and resigned from the commission but that, of course, is out of our control.”
In Washington, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Richardson’s resignation and his reasons for doing so “are cause for concern”. She said the US has urged Burma’s Government to fulfil its pledge to implement the Annan commission recommendations “as a matter of urgency”.
Richardson’s biting criticism of Suu Kyi and his resignation from the panel come as refugees cram camps in Bangladesh rife with crushing poverty, disease and a pervasive air of hopelessness. More than 680,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled the military of majority Buddhist Burma, which began what they called clearance operations following attacks by an Islamic militant group on August 25. The UN human rights chief has suggested that what’s happening to the Rohingya may be genocide.
Rohingya are severely discriminated against in Rakhine state and called illegal immigrants although many families have lived there for generations. They have been denied citizenship, freedom of movement and other basic rights.
Richardson, who has frequently negotiated for the release of Americans imprisoned in foreign countries, also said he was “very unhappy and distressed” by Suu Kyi’s heated reaction to his plea that two Reuters journalists detained on charges of violating a British colonial-era secrecy law used by a former military junta to muzzle freedom of speech “be treated fairly and rapidly”.
“That brought almost an explosion on her part, saying there were issues related to the official secrecies act, that that was not my charter as a member of the advisory board,” Richardson said.
“It was a very heated exchange that we had.”