A leading United Nations human rights investigator has slammed Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi for acting as a “fig leaf for military atrocities” against the Rohingya minority.
In an interview with the UK’s ‘The Daily Telegraph’, Australian lawyer Chris Sidoti said that Suu Kyi could not escape responsibility for failing to act over the violence.
His statement comes ahead of Tuesday's release of a 400-page report on alleged “genocidal” crimes against Rohingyas.
The report by a team of three independent experts, including Sidoti, will provide the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva with harrowing details of a killing and rape spree during a Myanmar military operation that prompted more than 700,000 Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh last year, reports the British newspaper.
“The very first thing she could have done was not provide cover for the military by dismissing the overwhelming number of reports of mass rape as fake,” it quoted Sidoti saying of the Nobel laureate.
“She could have refused to provide a fig leaf for military atrocities of the most serious kind," he said. "She has enormous moral authority, she won 80 percent of the popular vote in the 2015 election."
The presentation of the final investigation to the Swiss-based council will mark a crucial step on the long road to obtaining justice for thousands who lost their lives, their homes or who were brutalised during the merciless crackdown by Myanmar troops.
A preliminary report released last month by Sidoti, Marzuki Darusman, Indonesia’s former Attorney-General, and Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan lawyer and women’s rights expert, called for the country’s senior generals to be investigated and prosecuted for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Myanmar government has dismissed the call claiming it was based on “false allegations.”
But Sidoti remains resolute in his belief that the perpetrators will eventually be held to account, says the Daily Telegraph report.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen on Tuesday (Sept 18) but justice has a way of catching up with people,” it quoted him saying.
The Australian lawyer will travel to Geneva later this week to present the final results of a year-long UN-mandated investigation into allegations of war crimes against Myanmar’s Rohingya, Shan and Kachin minorities.
The presentation of the report to the UN’s Swiss-based Human Rights Council will be a crucial next step on the long road to obtaining justice for thousands who were brutally murdered, raped and forced out of their homes last year during a merciless military crackdown.
“The level of trauma in the camps in Bangladesh is beyond anything I have ever seen,” he told The Telegraph of his visits to the camps where more than 700,000 Rohingyas took shelter.
Experts recommended that a referral to the International Criminal Court in the Hague could be one option to pursue redress.
Sidoti echoed saying an ICC trial was only one way to push for justice, explaining that other options could include a specialised criminal tribunal or an individual country exercising its rights to universal jurisdiction for crimes of this magnitude.
“Pointing out the impossibility of the position that Myanmar has adopted, it’s both legal and moral lack of integrity and the need to cooperate with international investigations to address the issues of impunity and accountability, to completely overhaul the Tatmadaw [armed forces],” he added.
“This is now a matter that goes beyond Myanmar’s issues of national sovereignty. We are talking here about the gravest crimes under international law.”