Myanmar’s Suu Kyi told to ‘stop the genocide’ in UN court

Live Correspondent: Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi faced calls for Myanmar to “stop the genocide” of Rohingya Muslims as she personally led her country’s defence at the UN’s top court on Tuesday.

Suu Kyi, whose silence about the plight of the Rohingya has tarnished her reputation as a rights icon, sat through graphic accounts of murder and rape in the wood-panelled courtroom in The Hague.

Rights groups have criticised her decision to represent Myanmar at the International Court of Justice against accusations by the west African state of The Gambia that it has breached the 1948 Genocide Convention. Around 740,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh after a bloody crackdown by the Myanmar military in 2017 that UN investigators have already described as genocide.

Suu Kyi listened to accounts by The Gambia’s lawyers of Rohingya victims, including a mother whose one-year-old son was beaten to death and an eight- month-pregnant woman who was stamped on and then repeatedly raped.

Wearing traditional Burmese dress, the 74-year-old did not speak to waiting media after arriving at the court’s turreted Peace Palace headquarters in a motorcade with a police escort.

A group of some 50 pro-Rohingya protesters gathered outside the gates of the ICJ for the hearing, carrying banners saying: ‘Say yes to Rohingya, justice delayed is justice denied” and “Stop Burma military attack Rohingya.”

“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. ICJ judges have only once before ruled that genocide was committed, in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

Dhaka 10 December (campuslive24.com)//IHA

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