Arakan News Agency
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has avoided discussing reports of rape of women and girls from the Rohingya minority by Myanmar’s army and police forces when she met with the UN Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict, Pamela Patten, the Guardian reported Wednesday.
The newspaper said in a report on its website that it had seen an internal UN memorandum that Aung San Suu Kyi had completely avoided discussing the issue during her recent meeting with Patten, who visited Myanmar in mid-December for four days to discuss the crisis with officials. Governmental organizations.
“Suu Kyi, the State Counselor of the Myanmar government, has refused to engage in any substantive discussion on reports of widespread and systematic sexual violence committed in Arakan by soldiers, border police and Buddhist militias,” Patten was quoted as saying.
“The meeting with Suu Kyi was cordial and lasted about 45 minutes but unfortunately was not objective in nature,” the UN envoy wrote in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres last week.
The paper pointed out that more than 655 thousand Rohingya, the oppressed Muslim minority, fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh since the outbreak of violence in the state of Arakan in northern Myanmar last August, while MSF believes that at least 6 thousand and 700 Of Rohingya killed during clearance operations and many survivors say women and girls were gang-raped.
