UN investigator: Genocide still taking place in Myanmar

Genocide is still taking place against Rohingya Muslims remaining in Myanmar and the government is increasingly demonstrating it has no interest in establishing a fully functioning democracy, UN investigators said Wednesday.

Marzuki Darusman, chair of the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said thousands of Rohingya are still fleeing to Bangladesh, and the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 who have remained following last year's brutal military campaign in the Buddhist-majority country "continue to suffer the most severe" restrictions and repression.

"It is an ongoing genocide that is taking place at the moment," he told a news conference Wednesday.

Yanghee Lee, the UN special investigator on human rights in Myanmar, said she and many others in the international community hoped the situation under Aung San Suu Kyi "would be vastly different from the past but it is really not that much different from the past."
"It is not upholding justice and rule of law" which Suu Kyi "repeatedly says is the standard to which all in Myanmar are held." If this were the case, she said, fair laws would be applied impartially to all people, impunity would not rein, "and the law would not be wielded as a weapon of oppression."
"Conducive conditions means they should not go back to the existing laws, policies and practices ... the oppressive laws, the discrimination. The minimum they need is freedom of movement, access to basic health services."
Lee said "there's been a lot of progress in terms of economic development and infrastructure, but in the area of 'democratic space' and people's right to claim back their land ... there is no progress."
"The camps, the shelters, the model villages that are being built, it's more of a cementing of total segregation or separation from the Rakhine ethnic community."