‘Suu Kyi spoke at length about Myanmar troubles’

SYDNEY: Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi spoke at length about her country’s troubled state of Rakhine at a Sydney conference on Sunday and appealed to Southeast Asian neighbours for help, Australia’s prime minister said.

“We discussed the situation in Rakhine state at considerable length today,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told reporters at the end of a summit of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and Australia, much of it held behind closed doors.

“Daw Aung San Suu Kyi addressed the matter comprehensively at some considerable length herself... She seeks support from Asean and other nations to provide help from a humanitarian and capacity-building point of view,” he said, using a Burmese honorific. Turnbull did not tell reporters whether Suu Kyi gave details of what support she was seeking or whether she spoke specifically about violence against the Rohingya, however Asean’s Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance has been providing some aid since October.

UN officials say nearly 700,000 Muslim Rohingya have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh after militant attacks on August 25 last year sparked a crackdown, led by security forces, in Rakhine that the United Nations and United States have said constitutes ethnic cleansing. The UN independent investigator on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said in Geneva this month she saw growing evidence to suspect genocide had been committed.

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