UTV | COLOMBO – The United Nations’ top human rights official has raised the prospect of Myanmar’s de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi facing charges over the deaths and expulsion of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state.
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, says he would not be surprised if a future court found the military campaign against the Rohingya people amounted to genocide.
The UN has previously described the deaths and displacement of the Rohingya people as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
Earlier this month the human rights chief called for a criminal investigation.
But now Zeid says he cannot rule out the possibility of military and government leaders facing charges of genocide.
Zeid said he personally warned Suu Kyi to stop the killings in a phone call earlier this year. But regrettably, nothing happened.
“She said ‘this is awful, certainly we want to look at it’,” he said.
“But then a couple days after that, they began to question the methodology we had chosen. They began to question whether the facts were correct.”
Indeed, Suu Kyi had probably sanctioned the military’s actions against the Rohingyas, he said.
And Zeid suggested that she too might be culpable for failing to act.
There’s the crime of omission,” he said.
