Human rights claim draws ire

GENEVA: When a senior diplomat from Myanmar told a gathering of the United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday that his country was “committed to the defence of human rights”, he drew an outraged rebuttal from the UN’s top human rights official.

The claim “almost creates its own level of preposterousness”, said the official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, dispensing with the usual diplomatic courtesies.

“Have you no shame, sir?” he demanded. “Have you no shame?”

Al-Hussein announced in December that he would not seek a second four-year term as the world body’s human rights chief. This was his last appearance in the council before his term expires at the end of August.

The council was meeting in Geneva to debate the plight of more than 700,000 members of the Rohingya ethnic group from Myanmar stuck in overcrowded camps since fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh last year to escape a ferocious campaign of mass killings, rapes and burning of villages by Myanmar’s security forces.

Al-Hussein has condemned the crackdown on the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing and possibly even genocide. On Wednesday, he delivered a scathing review of Myanmar’s attempts to whitewash those events and challenged the government’s claims that it was willing to take the refugees back.

The senior diplomat, Kyaw Moe Tun, told the council that al-Hussein’s statement was misleading, relying on unverified facts, and he invoked the government’s stock defence, that the security forces were merely responding to attacks by Rohingya militants. Al-Hussein “conveniently failed to mention” a massacre of 99 Hindus he said was carried out by Rohingya “terrorists” Kyaw Moe Tun said.

Myanmar’s government, he said, strongly condemned all human rights violations.

Al-Hussein presented a very different narrative. More than 11,400 Rohingya have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state this year, and all those interviewed by his staff had reported continuing violence and abuses, he told the council.

“No amount of rhetoric can whitewash these facts,” he said. “People are still fleeing persecution in Rakhine and are even willing to risk dying at sea to escape.”

In January, Myanmar reached an agreement with Bangladesh on the repatriation of Rohingya refugees. In May, it struck an agreement with the UN that it presented as a first step toward their repatriation. But not a single Rohingya Muslim has been able to return as part of an official repatriation program, and UN agencies, which are still denied free access to Rakhine state, say there is no immediate prospect of starting one.

Moreover, the authorities have arrested most, if not all, of those who made their own way back. They included 58 Rohingya who returned between January and April and were then imprisoned.