Thursday 22 November 2018

'Defending the indefensible': Malaysia's Mahathir slams Aung San Suu Kyi over Rohingya crisis

Source Channelnewsasia, 13 Nov

SINGAPORE: Aung San Suu Kyi's response to the alleged atrocities against Myanmar's minority Rohingya community is "indefensible", said Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on Tuesday (Nov 13) in a withering criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. 


Mahathir, 93, said he was "very disappointed" by Aung San Suu Kyi's failure to defend the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority driven from Myanmar in their hundreds of thousands last year by an army campaign that UN investigators said amounted to genocide.


"Someone who has been detained before should know the sufferings and should not inflict it on the hapless," said Mahathir, in a reference to Aung San Suu Kyi's long years of house arrest under Myanmar's military rule.


"But it would seem that Aung San Suu Kyi is trying to defend what is indefensible," he told reporters. "They are actually oppressing these people to the point of killing them, mass killing."

Mahathir was asked on the sidelines of a speech he delivered in Singapore to comment on how Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi had been dealing with the Rohingya issue. 

A UN report in August detailed a military crackdown with genocidal intent that began in 2017 and drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state into neighbouring Bangladesh.


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