The Hague: Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi arrived at the UN’s top court Tuesday to personally defend Myanmar against accusations of genocide, in a remarkable fall from grace for the woman once hailed worldwide as a rights icon.
Wearing traditional Burmese dress, Myanmar’s civilian leader arrived at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a motorcade with police outriders without speaking to waiting media. The case, brought by the west African state of The Gambia, is the first attempt to bring Myanmar to justice over its bloody 2017 military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim minority. Suu Kyi was once mentioned in the same breath as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, but her international reputation has been tarnished by her silence over the plight of the Rohingya, and her defence of the same generals who once kept her under house arrest.
The case will also be watched in Bangladesh, where around 740,000 Rohingya were forced to flee into sprawling camps by the bloody campaign in Myanmar’s northwestern Rakhine state. “I demand justice from the world,” said Nur Karima, a Rohingya refugee whose brothers and grandparents were killed in a massacre in the village of Tula Toli in August 2017. “I want to see the convicts go to the gallows.
They killed us mercilessly,” Saida Khatun, another refugee from Tula Toli, told AFP. UN investigators last year branded the Rohingya crackdown genocide.
The three-day hearing promises to be a historic one for the ICJ, which was set up in 1946 to adjudicate disputes between UN member states. Muslim-majority Gambia, acting on behalf of the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, is due to speak on Tuesday. It alleges that Myanmar breached the 1948 Genocide Convention. It will ask the court for emergency measures to stop Myanmar’s “ongoing genocidal actions”.
“The genocidal acts committed during these operations were intended to destroy the Rohingya as a group, in whole or in part, by the use of mass murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence,” The Gambia said in its submission to the court. The move comes ahead of a wider case that could take years. Suu Kyi’s office has said she will “defend the national interests of Myanmar” as she becomes one of the first national leaders to lead their country’s defence at the court. She is due to speak on Wednesday, and is expected to argue that the court has no jurisdiction and that Myanmar was targeting Rohingya militants. (PTI)
