Ex-US diplomat quits Myanmar’s ‘whitewash’ Rohingya panel

A veteran US diplomat has resigned from an international advisory panel on the Rohingya Muslim crisis set up by Myanmar, denouncing it as a “whitewash and a cheerleading operation” for the government of the country’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Bill Richardson, a former cabinet member in the administration of former US President Bill Clinton, announced his resignation from the advisory panel in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday.

“The main reason I am resigning is that the advisory board is mainly a whitewash and a cheerleading operation for the Myanmar government, and I’m not going to be part of it because I think there are serious issues of human rights violations, safety, citizenship, peace and stability that need to be addressed,” Richardson said. “I just felt that my advice and counsel would not be heeded.”

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has been engaging in a bloody crackdown on minority Muslims in the western state of Rakhine. Military soldiers and Buddhist mobs have been attacking Rohingya villages in Rakhine since November 2016, killing, wounding, and raping members of the Muslim community and burning down their houses in what has been described by the United Nations (UN) as “ethnic cleansing.”

Suu Kyi’s government has been denying the widespread reports and eyewitness accounts of horrific violence against the Muslims. The military siege on Rakhine means reporters are barred from entering the state, but they have been interviewing many of the Muslims who manage to flee to Bangladesh and have been documenting their plight. International medics stationed in Bangladeshi camps have also confirmed that the wounds on the bodies of the refugee Muslims correspond to the accounts of violence they have been subjected to.

‘Suu Kyi blaming everyone else’

Richardson, who was a former US ambassador to the UN, chastised Suu Kyi for blaming outsiders for the Rohingya crisis and lacking “moral leadership” to address the plight of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees who fled the brutal violence in Rakhine to Bangladesh.

“She blames all the problems that Myanmar is having on the international media, on the UN, on human rights groups, on other governments, and I think this is caused by the bubble that is around her, by individuals that are not giving her frank advice,” he said, referring to Suu Kyi.

“She has not shown moral leadership on the Rakhine issue and the allegations made, and I regret that,” Richardson said.

Richardson said Suu Kyi seems to want the 10-member advisory board — established to implement earlier recommendations by a group led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan — to validate her policies against the Muslim minority group.

US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert called Richardson’s decision to resign from the board and his reasons for doing so “cause for concern.”

Richardson also said that in a meeting with Suu Kyi earlier this week, he had brought up the case of two Reuters reporters who were on trial in Myanmar over accusations of obtaining secret documents regarding state-sponsored violence against minority Rohingya Muslims in the country’s west.

Richardson said Suu Kyi’s response to the issue was “furious,” and that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate said the case of the reporters “was not part of the work of the advisory board.”

The UN says nearly 655,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine to Bangladesh since the military launched a new wave of bloody violence there last August. Only the first month since then, the military clampdown killed some 6,700 Rohingya Muslims, including more than 700 children, according to the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar brands the minority Rohingya Muslims in the country as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, refusing to accept them as citizens despite the fact that they have lived in the country for many generations.

Bangladesh and Myanmar recently finalized an agreement that would facilitate the repatriation of the Rohingya refugees over the next two years. But the refugees have expressed serious concern about their safety back in Myanmar.

Bangladesh, too, denies citizenship to the Muslims.

Government responds

The government in Myanmar was quick to react to Richardson’s resignation, accusing the former American diplomat of staging a “personal attack” on Suu Kyi.

“He should review himself over his personal attack against our state counselor,” Myanmar’s government spokesman Zaw Htay told AFP.

The spokesman said the issue of the Reuters reporters’ detention was not in Richardson’s mandate and he should not have discussed it at the meeting with Suu Kyi.

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