Arakan News Agency
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has denied the campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country’s Muslim minority, despite many reports of repression and torture.
In an interview with the BBC, Suu Kyi, a Nobel Prize laureate, said she was aware of some of the problems Rohingya was facing in Arakan.
The use of the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe their situation in the country was “exaggerated”.
“Myanmar is ready to welcome those who wish to return to the country from the Rohingya Muslims,” she said.
“I do not think the Rohingya Muslims are being subjected to ethnic cleansing,” she said. “There is a lot of enmity there – Muslims are killing each other, too, if they think some of them are cooperating with the authorities.”
Many believe that Suu Kyi’s silence over what happened with the Rohingya Muslims has damaged her reputation as a supporter of human rights.
Suu Kyi has been under international pressure since the Myanmar government (also known as Burma) began military operations in Arakan state.
More than 70,000 of them are believed to have been displaced from the country.
A UN report last month said Myanmar security forces had committed murders and rapes against Rohingyas living in Myanmar for decades, yet many in the country see them as immigrants from Bangladesh.
Some 75,000 Rohingyas from Myanmar were displaced by repression in a military campaign launched by the army, north of the troubled state of Arakan, in search of the Rohingya who attacked their posts in October.
UN investigators believe the country’s security forces have committed crimes against humanity.
But denied any knowledge of the attacks in October, and denied that the army committed any violations of any kind in the state of Arakan, “noting that” they were sent there to fight, not to torture people and rape and the theft of their property. ”
