TIME :
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi acknowledged Thursday that her government could have better handled the violence against Rohingya Muslims in the country’s western Rakhine state. U.N. investigators have said the campaign by the Myanmar military was carried out with “genocidal intent.”
Since Aug. 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh amid what they described as a brutal campaign of gang rape, arson and mass killing. The ethnic cleansing operation has spawned one of the largest, ongoing humanitarian catastrophes, but the military has largely denied wrongdoing.
Suu Kyi, a onetime democracy icon, sparked international ire for standing by the armed forces. U.N. experts accused her administration of allowing hate speech to thrive, while also failing to protect minorities from military atrocities.
“There are of course ways in which, with hindsight, the situation could’ve been handled better,” Suu Kyi said at the World Economic Forum on ASEAN in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, according to Reuters.
“But we believe that in order to have long-term security and stability we have to be fair to all sides. We can’t choose who should be protected by rule of law,” she said.
At the same event, she also addressed the plight of two imprisoned Reuters journalists who were sentenced to seven years in prison last week for violating an arcane state secrets law after they exposed a massacre of Rohingya men and boys. “What I want to know is whether they feel there has been a miscarriage of justice,” Suu Kyi said of the widely pilloried trial that was riddled with irregularities.
