Arakan News Agency
Myanmar’s government remains “in denial” about alleged atrocities by its military against minority Rohingya Muslims, officials present at a meeting in Bangladesh said, despite leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s pledge to investigate the findings of a devastating U.N. report.
The closed-door meeting of diplomats, government officials and international agencies in Dhaka follows a report last week from the United Nations human rights office that said soldiers committed mass killings and gang rapes in a “calculated policy of terror” in Myanmar’s northwestern Arakan State in recent months.
“When Bangladesh cited the horrific acts by Myanmar’s law enforcing agencies, the Myanmar representative did not agree with this and was in complete denial,” said H.T. Imam, a political advisor to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who was at the meeting.
Three international diplomats also present at the Sunday meeting broadly corroborated that account.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein told the New York Times that Suu Kyi had appeared “genuinely moved” by the harrowing 43-page report, released on Friday, expressing no defensiveness or denial.
While the Nobel Peace Prize laureate does not have control of the security forces, which remain powerful under Myanmar’s military-drafted constitution, she controls the ministries of foreign affairs and information, which have shaped the country’s public response to the four-month-old crisis in Arakan.
Suu Kyi has been criticised in the West for not speaking out about abuses against the Rohingya.
Myanmar has previously denied almost all reports of killings, rapes and arson in northwest Arakan, where it says its army is engaged in a lawful counterinsurgency campaign.
Aye Aye Soe, deputy director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Reuters on Monday that Myanmar took the U.N. findings seriously and would investigate.
But she added that the country had been the victim of “disinformation, misinformation and fake news” on the issue that meant “the international community seems to have made up its mind”.
“We don’t know if these allegations are true,” said Aye Aye Soe. “If we find that these allegations are true, we will take action.”
