THE New York Times reported on Tuesday that Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, once the darling of the West and an icon of democracy, has fallen from grace.
Quoting United Nations investigators, the report said she could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and genocide because of the military’s attacks on Rohingya Muslims and other minority groups.
The report said a panel of investigators, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM), discovered that some 660,000 Rohingya people who remained in Myanmar have been facing systematic persecution by the Myanmar military.
IIFFMM chairman and former Indonesian attorney-general Marzuki Darusman said: “Myanmar is failing in its obligation to prevent genocide, to investigate genocide and to enact effective legislation criminalising and punishing genocide.”
In his report to the UN Human Rights Council, Marzuki said the policies and practices that laid the basis for the military campaigns of 2017 are still in place.
“Impunity continues. Discrimination continues. Hate speech continues. Persecution continues.”
Myanmar rejected the report as one-sided and a blatant exercise of “misinformation.”
Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Kyaw Moe Tun, said the panel lacked impartiality.
Ever since Suu Kyi took office as the civilian head of government in 2016, the Nobel laureate has been criticised for failing to challenge the military, known as the Tatmadaw, over its atrocities in Rakhine State, home to the Rohingya.
Under her watch, the list of political prisoners and people facing politically-motivated charges had increased, as has the number of people charged with defaming the military.
She failed to control the brutal regime of Tatmadaw, despite her position as head of a party that controls 60 per cent of seats in Parliament.
Legally, she was in a position to change every law, except the Constitution, said Yanghee Lee, a United Nations expert on Myanmar.
Lee told the Human Rights Council that the military was using helicopter gunships, heavy artillery and land mines in civilian areas of Rakhine State against rebels.
The military had continued to use torture in operations against Kachin, Shan and other ethnic minorities in northern Myanmar.
Sexual violence was a prominent part of its campaign against the Rohingya.
Australian lawyer and panel member Christopher Sidoti said: “The longer this goes on, the more impossible it is for the civilian side of the government to escape international criminal responsibility for the human rights situation in Myanmar.”
The report stated that many Rohingya remained living in camps, denied education or healthcare, unable to make a living, and remained subjected to discriminatory citizenship laws that amount to a “tool of persecution”.
Denying these people of their rights to basic services such as education is an element of the crime against humanity.
Sidoti added that the mission had identified more than 150 people linked to “numerous international crimes”.
According to the BBC news portal, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the human rights chief, is determined to bring the perpetrators to justice.
“I don’t rule out the possibility that civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the head of the armed forces, General Aung Min Hlaing, could find themselves in the dock on genocide charges in the future.” He told BBC that he had urged Suu Kyi to protect the Rohingya six months before the violence and atrocities began in October 2016.
“I appealed to her to bring these military operations to an end. I appealed to her emotional standing, to do whatever she could to bring this to a close, but to my great regret, it did not seem to happen.”
Zeid said Suu Kyi's power over the army is limited. Nevertheless, he said, she should have done more to stop the military campaigns. He criticised her for failing to use the term “Rohingya”.
“To strip their name from them is dehumanising to the point where you begin to believe that anything is possible.”
He said the military was emboldened when the international community took no action against them after the violence in 2016.
Edmund Burke was right. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
The writer, a former federal counsel at the Attorney-General’s Chambers, is deputy chairman of Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War