UN investigator condemns Suu Kyi as 'fig leaf for genocide'

A leading United Nations human rights investigator has slated Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi as a "fig leaf for military atrocities" against the Rohingyas.

The Australian UN expert Chris Sidoti says Nobel laureate Suu Kyi cannot escape responsibility for failing to act over the violence that forced over 700,000 Rohingyas to flee from the Rakhine State to Bangladesh. 

"The very first thing she could have done was not provide cover for the military by dismissing the overwhelming number of reports of mass rape as fake," Sidoti, a member of the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar, told The Daily Telegraph.

"She could have refused to provide a fig leaf for military atrocities of the most serious kind... she has enormous moral authority, she won 80 per cent of the popular vote in the 2015 election," he added.

The newspaper interviewed him ahead of Tuesday’s release of a 400-page report on alleged "genocidal" crimes.

Christopher Sidoti, member of the Independent International Fact-finding Mission on Myanmar attends a news conference for the publication of a final written report at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, August 27, 2018. Reuters

The report, by three independent experts including Sidoti, provides the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva with harrowing details of mass killings and rape by Myanmar's military.

The presentation of the final investigation to the Swiss-based council will mark a crucial step on the long road to obtaining justice for thousands who lost their lives or their homes or who were brutalised during the merciless operation by Myanmar's troops.

A preliminary report released last month by Sidoti, former Indonesian attorney-general Marzuki Darusman and Sri Lankan lawyer and women’s rights expert Radhika Coomaraswamy, called for Myanmar’s senior generals to be prosecuted for genocide.

Based on 875 interviews with victims and eyewitnesses plus satellite imagery, it documents the shooting and stabbing of children, the scorching of Rohingya villages and gang rape on an enormous scale.

"The level of trauma in the camps in Bangladesh is beyond anything I have ever seen," Sidoti told The Daily Telegraph.

The Myanmar government dismissed the UN investigators' findings as "false allegations" last month.

The UN panel, however, has recommended a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague as an option, which has already won support from some quarters.

More than 160 British MPs signed a letter urging Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt to refer Myanmar's military to the court last week.

Sidoti, a former Human Rights Commissioner and ex-commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission, said an ICC trial was only one way to push for justice.

Other options could include a specialised criminal tribunal or an individual country exercising its rights to universal jurisdiction for crimes of this magnitude, he explained.

Tuesday's report will also remind the international community of its obligations to take action, and will explicitly include a call for a ban on arms sales and on "high level exchanges and training" with the Myanmar military until it has been reconstituted.

The reluctance of the international community to act sooner is "the most haunting question of all", according to Sidoti.