yanmar
leader Aung San Suu Kyi faced rising global pressure Tuesday to solve the
crisis for her nation’s displaced Rohingya Muslim minority, meeting the UN
chief and America’s top diplomat in the Philippines.
UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres told the Nobel laureate that hundreds of thousands of
displaced Muslims who had fled to Bangladesh should be allowed to return to
their homes in Myanmar.
“The
Secretary-General highlighted that strengthened efforts to ensure humanitarian
access, safe, dignified, voluntary and sustained returns, as well as true
reconciliation between communities, would be essential,” a UN statement said,
summarising comments to Suu Kyi.
Guterres’
comments came hours before Suu Kyi sat down with US Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila.
Washington
has been cautious in its statements on the situation in Rakhine, and has
avoided outright criticism of Suu Kyi.
Supporters
say she must navigate a path between outrage abroad and popular feeling in a
majority Buddhist country where most people believe the Rohingya are
interlopers.
At a photo
opportunity at the top of her meeting with Tillerson, Suu Kyi ignored a
journalist who asked if the Rohingya were citizens of Myanmar.
At a later
appearance after the meeting, Tillerson — who is headed to Myanmar on Wednesday
— was asked by reporters if he “had a message for Burmese leaders”.
He
apparently ignored the question, replying only: “Thank you”, according to a
pool report of the encounter.
‘Ethnic
cleansing’
More than
600,000 Rohingya have flooded into Bangladesh since late August, and now live
in the squalor of the world’s biggest refugee camp.
The crisis
erupted after Rohingya rebels attacked police posts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state,
triggering a military crackdown that saw hundreds of villages reduced to ashes
and sparked a massive exodus.
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The UN says
the Myanmar military is engaged in a “coordinated and systematic” attempt to
purge the region of Rohingya in what amounts to a “textbook example of ethnic
cleansing”.
The stream
of desperate refugees who escape across the riverine border bring with them
stories of rape, murder and the torching of villages by soldiers and Buddhist
mobs.
The Burmese
government insists military action in Rakhine is a proportionate response to
violence by militants.
Following
its first official investigation into the crisis, the army published a report
this week in which it cleared itself of any abuses.
However, it
heavily restricts access to the region by independent journalists and aid
groups, and verification of events on the ground is virtually impossible.
Suu Kyi, a
former democracy activist, has been lambasted by rights groups for failing to
speak up for the Rohingya or condemn festering anti-Muslim sentiment in the
country.
Musician and
campaigner Bob Geldof on Monday slammed Suu Kyi as a “murderer” and a
“handmaiden to genocide”, becoming the latest in a growing line of global
figures to disavow the one-time darling of the human rights community.
Supporters
say she does not have the power to stop the powerful military, which ruled the
country for decades until her party came to power following 2015 elections.
In a summit
on Monday night with leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian
Nations, of which Myanmar is a member, Guterres also voiced concern about the
Rohingya.
He said the
displacement of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya was a “worrying escalation in
a protracted tragedy,” according to the UN statement.
He described
the situation as a potential source of instability in the region, as well as
radicalisation.
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