{"id":114171,"date":"2018-07-09T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=114171"},"modified":"2018-07-06T18:50:58","modified_gmt":"2018-07-06T17:50:58","slug":"have-you-no-shame-myanmar-is-flogged-for-violence-against-rohingya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/have-you-no-shame-myanmar-is-flogged-for-violence-against-rohingya\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Have You No Shame?\u2019 Myanmar Is Flogged for Violence against Rohingya"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A Rohingya refugee from Myanmar carried water through a refugee camp in Bangladesh last month. The refugees fled last year to escape a ferocious campaign of violence by Myanmar\u2019s security forces. Rebecca Conway for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n

4 Jul 2018<\/em> \u2014 When a senior diplomat from Myanmar told a gathering of the United Nations Human Rights Council today that his country was \u201ccommitted to the defense of human rights,\u201d he drew an outraged rebuttal from the United Nations\u2019 top human rights official.<\/p>\n

The claim \u201calmost creates its own level of preposterousness,\u201d said the official, Zeid Ra\u2019ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, dispensing with the usual diplomatic courtesies.<\/p>\n

\u201cHave you no shame, sir?\u201d he demanded. \u201cHave you no shame?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. al-Hussein announced in December<\/a> that he would not seek a second four-year term as the world body\u2019s human rights chief. This was his last appearance in the council before his term expires at the end of August.<\/p>\n

The council was meeting in Geneva to debate the plight of more than 700,000 members of the Rohingya ethnic group from Myanmar stuck in overcrowded camps since fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh last year to escape a ferocious campaign of mass killings, rapes and burning of villages by Myanmar\u2019s security forces.<\/p>\n

Mr. al-Hussein has condemned the crackdown on the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing and possibly even genocide. On Wednesday, he delivered a scathing review of Myanmar\u2019s attempts to whitewash those events and challenged the government\u2019s claims that it was willing to take the refugees back.<\/p>\n

The senior diplomat, U Kyaw Moe Tun, told the council that Mr. al-Hussein\u2019s statement was misleading, relying on unverified facts, and he invoked the government\u2019s stock defense, that the security forces were merely responding to attacks by Rohingya militants. Mr. al-Hussein \u201cconveniently failed to mention\u201d a massacre of 99 Hindus he said was carried out by Rohingya \u201cterrorists,\u201d Mr. Kyaw Moe Tun said.<\/p>\n

Myanmar\u2019s government, he said, strongly condemned all human rights violations.<\/p>\n

Mr. al-Hussein presented a very different narrative. More than 11,400 Rohingyas had fled Rakhine State in Myanmar this year, and all those interviewed by his staff had reported continuing violence and abuses, he told the council.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo amount of rhetoric can whitewash these facts,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople are still fleeing persecution in Rakhine and are even willing to risk dying at sea to escape.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January, Myanmar reached an agreement with Bangladesh on the repatriation of Rohingya refugees. In May, it struck an agreement<\/a> with the United Nations that it presented as a first step toward their repatriation. But not a single Rohingya Muslim has been able to return as part of an official repatriation program, and United Nations agencies, which are still denied free access to Rakhine State, say there is no immediate prospect of starting one.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the authorities had arrested most, if not all, of those who had made their own way back. They included 58 Rohingyas who returned between January and April and were then imprisoned. After receiving a presidential pardon, the members of the group were transferred to a \u201creception center\u201d in conditions that Mr. al-Hussein likened to administrative detention. About 90 others who tried to leave Rakhine State by boat last month, but were forced back by engine failure, had also been detained.<\/p>\n

Myanmar\u2019s sincerity on repatriation would not be demonstrated by the number of agreements it signed, Mr. al-Hussein observed, but only by granting citizenship to the Rohingya, including 120,000 villagers displaced by violent clashes in 2012 and held in camps ever since.<\/p>\n

He gave an equally stark assessment of prospects for any meaningful investigation by an independent commission of inquiry, which the government announced in May when it said it would look into allegations of violations by the security forces. The government has conducted a series of inquiries into these events but has issued blanket denials of abuses and has blamed Rohingya militants for instigating any violence.<\/p>\n

The only exception, Mr. al-Hussein said, was a village massacre reported by Reuters that resulted in 10-year prison sentences for seven soldiers. Two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who investigated those events remain in jail on charges of violating Myanmar\u2019s official secrets act.<\/p>\n

\u201cMyanmar has a pattern of investigative whitewashing,\u201d Mr. al-Hussein told the Human Rights Council. \u201cThere is every reason to believe that another internal inquiry will again seek to whitewash the terrible crimes which have occurred, laying the ground for a new wave of violence in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, he urged the council to create an independent international team that would use evidence gathered by a United Nations fact-finding team to investigate the criminal liability of individuals involved in the security forces\u2019 campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cMyanmar must grasp that the international community will not forget the outrages committed against the Rohingya,\u201d he said, \u201cnor will it absolve the politicians who seek to cover them up.\u201d<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2018, on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: U.N. Official Excoriates Myanmar for Abuses.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Jul 2018 \u2014 When a senior diplomat from Myanmar told a gathering of the UNHRC today that his country was \u201ccommitted to the defense of human rights,\u201d he drew an outraged rebuttal from Zeid Ra\u2019ad al-Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, dispensing with the usual diplomatic courtesies. \u201cHave you no shame, sir?\u201d he demanded. \u201cHave you no shame? The claim almost creates its own level of preposterousness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":114172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}