Suu Kyi to miss UN General Assembly
Nobel laureate’s reputation as rights defender in ruins over Myanmar violence
Aung San Suu Kyi will not attend the UN General Assembly later this month, her spokesman has said, as the Nobel laureate faces a barrage of criticism over her failure to speak up for Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
A crackdown by Myanmar’s army, launched in response to Rohingya militant attacks on 25 August, has sent some 370,000 Rohingya refugees scrambling across the border to Bangladesh in less than three weeks.
The violence has incubated a humanitarian crisis on both sides of the border.
Bangladesh is struggling to provide relief for exhausted and hungry refugees — some 60 per cent of whom are children — while nearly 30,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have been displaced inside Myanmar.
The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, accused Myanmar of waging a “systematic attack” on the Muslim Rohingya minority and warned that “ethnic cleansing” seemed to be under way .
Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s first civilian leader in decades, does not control the actions of the powerful military, which ran the country for 50 years before allowing free elections in 2015.
There is also scant sympathy among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority for the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim group branded “Bengalis” — shorthand for illegal immigrants.
But outside of her country, her reputation as a rights defender is in ruins over the Rohingya crisis.
Rohingya refugees have told chilling accounts of soldiers firing on civilians and razing entire villages in northern Rakhine state with the help of Buddhist mobs.
The army denies the allegations while Aung San Suu Kyi has also played down claims of atrocities, instead blaming “a huge iceberg of misinformation” for complicating the conflict.