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Rohingya Crisis ‘Could Have Been Handled Better,’ Aung San Suu Kyi Says

HANOI, Vietnam — Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, on Thursday sidestepped widespread accusations that her country’s military had unleashed ethnic cleansing on Rohingya Muslims, a campaign so brutal that the United Nations has recommended that top commanders be tried for genocide.

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Rohingya Crisis ‘Could Have Been Handled Better,’ Aung San Suu Kyi Says
By
Hannah Beech
, New York Times

HANOI, Vietnam — Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, on Thursday sidestepped widespread accusations that her country’s military had unleashed ethnic cleansing on Rohingya Muslims, a campaign so brutal that the United Nations has recommended that top commanders be tried for genocide.

“There are, of course, ways in which, with hindsight, we might think that the situation could have been handled better, but we believe that for the sake of long-term stability and security, we have to be fair to all sides,” Suu Kyi said in a rare appearance at an international forum, in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital.

Since August of last year, more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring Bangladesh amid a frenzy of executions, rapes and village burnings in the north of Rakhine state in Myanmar. International human rights groups have extensively documented the way Myanmar’s military organized the bloodshed, in which at least 10,000 people were killed, according to a U.N. estimate.

But Suu Kyi declined to criticize what she delicately referred to as “the military aspect” in her talk at the World Economic Forum on ASEAN. Instead, she chastised the international community for not focusing on violence carried out by armed Rohingya militants against members of other ethnic and religious groups in Rakhine.

“For the government, we have to be fair to all of them, even if the rest of the world is not interested,” Suu Kyi said Thursday.

Her government has not said how many non-Rohinyga have been killed over the past year in Rakhine, but numbers from local officials suggest that the total figure is somewhat higher than 50.

The military’s crackdown began after Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an army station in August 2017, killing about a dozen security personnel. For years, the Rohingya have faced widespread persecution by Myanmar’s military, which has herded many into camps and restricted their access to education and health care. Most have been stripped of their citizenship, although Rakhine is their home.

Suu Kyi, a former dissident and Nobel Peace laureate who became Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader after her party swept elections in 2015, has been harshly criticized for failing to stop or even acknowledge the atrocities carried out against the Rohingya. Various international awards given to her for her commitment to nonviolent democratic resistance have been rescinded.

But she remains popular at home, where the Rohingya Muslim minority is widely reviled among the mostly Buddhist population.

Suu Kyi rarely accepts questions from the public about the Rohingya crisis. She will not be attending the U.N. General Assembly this month, an event she also skipped last year as outrage mounted over the exodus of the Rohingya.

At the Hanoi event, Suu Kyi acknowledged that her civilian government was bound to be blamed for whatever happened in Myanmar, even if the military still controls top Cabinet posts and one-quarter of parliamentary seats.

“Although we have only 75 percent of the power, we have to accept 100 percent of the responsibility,” she said. “That’s what elected government is all about.”

The military, which ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years and still shares power with civilian authorities, kept Suu Kyi under house arrest for more than 15 years before her release in 2010.

On Thursday, she also addressed the seven-year sentences handed down this month by a Myanmar court to Reuters reporters who uncovered a massacre of Rohingya in one Rakhine village. Suu Kyi said the reporters’ crime was not journalism but having violated Myanmar’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act, and she accused critics of not having “bothered to read” the summary of the judgment.

“If anybody feels there has been a miscarriage of justice, I would like them to point it out,” she said.

Vice President Mike Pence has appealed for the reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, to be released, adding his voice to a chorus of international condemnation of the sentencing.

Suu Kyi said Thursday that she had formed commissions — at least half a dozen, to date — to look into the broader situation in Rakhine state. International members of one of these commissions — including Bill Richardson, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — have quit in protest this year, saying they did not want to participate in a whitewash.

Although Myanmar and Bangladesh signed an agreement last year to begin repatriating willing Rohingya back to Rakhine, Suu Kyi blamed Bangladesh for having stymied the process, which she said was supposed to have begun in January. “At that time, Bangladesh said they were not quite ready yet,” she said. “We cannot go and fetch them from Bangladesh.” In the camps in Bangladesh, which constitute the world’s largest single refugee settlement, some Rohingya have expressed reluctance to return to the site of so much slaughter by the Myanmar military and Buddhist mobs.

“It is wet and uncomfortable here,” Noor Farooq, a former shopkeeper in Rakhine, said Thursday, as monsoon rains threatened to wash away more refugee shelters built on recently denuded hills in eastern Bangladesh. “I miss my home. But at least I am safer here than in Rakhine.”

Suu Kyi gave her talk in Hanoi to a room that was barely half full. It was a marked difference from her first appearance at the World Economic Forum in 2012, when she traveled to Bangkok for her first overseas trip in nearly a quarter century. Freed from long years of house arrest, she was mobbed in Thailand like a rock star and held up as a paragon of moral authority in the face of military excess.

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