"Suu Kyi’s rhetoric meant to hide calculated ethnic cleasning in Myanmar"

Tuesday’s much-awaited speech by Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi on an ongoing bout of brutality against the Rohingya Muslims was indeed hollow rhetoric to create confusion on the "calculated ethnic cleansing" and minimize the significance of statistics and evidence attesting to their plight, says a political analyst.

In an interview with Press TV, Barry Grossman, an international lawyer and activist from Bali, Indonesia, touched on Suu Kyi’s failure to denounce the obvious excesses imposed by the Buddhist army on the Rohingyas.

As for her reference to Myanmar’s embrace of the recommendations by the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, chaired by former UN chief Kofi Anan, Grossman said, she seemed to sidestep the core issue of "restoring the citizenship of more than one million Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar” who have been stateless since the 1980s.

He talked of the already discriminatory practices in place which deny the Rohingya the ability to get birth documents to establish their citizenship.

According to Grossman, Suu Kyi talked of evidence of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army - a new organization committed to protecting the Rohingya - being involved in terrorism without referring to any evidence "which we all know is non-existent."

The commentator dismissed as irrelevant Suu Kyi’s remarks on Myanmar’s commitment to the peace process in the context of the current crisis, arguing that there is no armed conflict and no need to talk about the peace process "but a handful of Rohingya armed with stones, spears, knives and a few outdated pistols which may or may not have ammunition which the Myanmar military could deal with very easily.”

Grossman drew an analogy between the Rohingyas’ exodus from Myanmar and the forced mass migration of Palestinians after Israel occupied their land, and said this is a plan of “calculated ethnic cleansing supported by unrestrained massacres, rapes, murder and the burning of countless villages designed to scare the Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar into neighboring countries, exactly the same way the Zionists did with the Palestinians in 1948.”

He highlighted the need for a comprehensive international investigation into the situation on the ground, “bearing in mind that there are thousands of victims recounting their experience.”

PressTV-Suu Kyi defends handling of violence against Muslims

Myanmar's leader says the reasons why Rohingyas are fleeing to Bangladesh elude her. Amnesty says she is "burying her head in the sand" in the face of "crimes against humanity."

More than 417,000 stateless Rohingya Muslims, who have suffered years of persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, have been forced to flee the country in the wake of a massive brutal crackdown by the regime which the UN rights body has described as “ethnic cleansing." 

The government claims over 400 people have been killed, but the UN estimates the death toll to be well above 1,000. Just days into the outbreak of the violence in August, the European Rohingya Council said between 2,000 and 3,000 Muslims had been killed in Rakhine.

Neighboring Bangladesh has already taken in several hundred thousand refugees.

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