Press Release: UN and Myanmar smoke and mirrors on Rohingya plight means no UN resolution in sight

MEDIA STATEMENT 7 JULY 2017

CENTRE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS RESEARCH & ADVOCACY (CENTHRA)

UN and Myanmar smoke and mirrors on Rohingya plight means no UN resolution in sight

The Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy (CENTHRA) notes that recently in March 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a report prepared by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in investigating allegations of mass killings taking place in Myanmar since late 2016, when some 75,000 ethnic Rohingya, already suffering from systematic state sponsored persecution for decades, fled violence by a military hell bent on blaming them for a minor border incident on 9 September the same year.

The report included accounts of mass killings and gang rapes by troops in north-western Myanmar in recent months in what it has described as a calculated policy of terror, which most probably constituted crimes against humanity. The Government of Myanmar led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi had rejected the findings of the report outright despite promising to ‘investigate’ its contents.

Despite all the evidence already cited in support of the report’s findings, and indeed the findings of countless previous reports, the United Nations has decided to send a further fact finding team to Myanmar to focus on allegations of killings, rape and torture by security forces against Rohingyas. In response to this, the Government of Myanmar has stated that it will deny visas to this United Nations team of human rights investigators.

CENTHRA is of the firm opinion that contrary to the general view that the decision by Aung San Suu Kyi to deny visas to this UN team indicates friction between the UN and the regime in Myanmar; it is in fact indicative of their implicit partnership. While the regime in Myanmar continues to terrorise and kill innocent members of an ethnic minority, the UN continuously finds ways and means to avoid imposing much needed and much demanded tangible economic and political sanctions against this regime, unlike as is the case with Iran and North Korea, for example.

Indeed, recently leaked internal UN documents reveal that the organization has failed miserably to protect the Rohingya while over-emphasizing development investment as the solution to Myanmar’s problems. By banning an investigative mission, the regime is essentially providing the UN with a rebuttal against the charges of incompetence; implying that UN investigations are meaningful and effective; while UN staff themselves secretly acknowledge that they are, in fact, useless. 

By postponing the fact-finding mission, Aung San Suu Kyi has clearly deflected growing discontent with UN inaction, allowing UN officials to demand nothing more than the right to pursue the course they themselves know is ineffectual; ineffectual, that is, except insofar as it furthers the interests of foreign investors and their globalist cohorts. She has, in short, done the UN a favour. And the UN officials have thanked her for this favour behind the scenes.

CENTHRA believes that there is, in effect, a game of smoke and mirrors being played by both the United Nations and the Myanmar regime into which the international community has been drawn as an unaware and unwilling participant.

The role of the United Nations in this game is to use its mandate to divert, not impose, pressure on the regime; delaying any calls for active intervention to halt the genocide, and the regime is cooperating with this agenda quite consciously. The reason this is being done is because both sides are anxious to ensure that investment opportunities within Myanmar, especially those made available to globalist corporations and their cronies in governments around the world, will not be lost, hindered or be subject to restricted access on account of ensuring regime accountability for its genocidal actions against the ethnic Rohingya within its territory. 

As such, it seems clear now that no meaningful solution to the catastrophe that has and still is befalling the Rohingya people is going to come via the United Nations. The matter must be taken up directly with the globalist investors and corporations whose interests the UN is serving, and it must be taken up by the consumers in the constituencies of those multinational companies whether in Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia or the entire ASEAN region, and indeed, around the world. CENTHRA accordingly calls on the relevant parties to do the necessary in this regard.

This Medias Statement has been issued by Azril Mohd Amin, Chief Executive of the Centre for Human Rights and Advocacy (CENTHRA).