Myanmar has deepened its row with US diplomat Bill Richardson, saying it made the decision to dump him from an advisory panel on the Rohingya crisis and accusing the veteran politician of a “personal attack” on Aung San Suu Kyi in his stinging resignation letter.



The war of words has heaped embarrassment on the Burmese leader whose star as a rights defender continues to plummet over her failure to speak out for the Rohingya in the face of overwhelming evidence of the Muslim minority group’s suffering.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s office said that during discussions in Myanmar’s capital on 22 January “it became evident” that Richardson was not interested in providing advice as one of five international members of a new panel on a crisis that has seen nearly 690,000 Rohingya flee a military crackdown to Bangladesh.

“In view of the difference of opinion that developed, the government decided that his continued participation on the board would not be in the best interest of all concerned,” the office said in an English statement posted on Facebook.

The Burmese-language version said they decided to “terminate” his participation.

Myanmar’s explanation stands in stark contrast to Richardson’s, who after his three-day visit to the country said he could not in “good conscience” sit on a panel he feared would only “whitewash” the causes of the Rohingya crisis.

He tore into the Nobel laureate for an “absence of moral leadership” over the problem and described her “furious response” to his calls to free two Reuters journalists arrested while covering the crisis.

Carpenters work at a newly-built repatriation camp being prepared for Rohingya refugees who are expected to return from Bangladesh. Photograph: Thein Zaw/AP

A Myanmar government spokesman hit back earlier on Thursday, accusing the former New Mexico governor of overstepping the mark.

“He should review himself over his personal attack against our state counsellor,” government spokesman Zaw Htay told AFP, using Aung San Suu Kyi’s official title.

Urging understanding instead of blame, Zaw Htay said the issue of the arrests was beyond Richardson’s mandate and he should not have brought it up at his meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi.

The heated discussion left Myanmar’s leader “quivering” with rage, Richardson told the New York Times.

Q&A Who are the Rohingya and what happened to them in Myanmar? Show Described as the world’s most persecuted people, 1.1 million Rohingya people live in Myanmar. They live predominately in Rakhine state, where they have co-existed uneasily alongside Buddhists for decades. Rohingya people say they are descendants of Muslims, perhaps Persian and Arab traders, who came to Myanmar generations ago. Unlike the Buddhist community, they speak a language similar to the Bengali dialect of Chittagong in Bangladesh. The Rohingya are reviled by many in Myanmar as illegal immigrants and suffer from systematic discrimination. The Myanmar government treats them as stateless people, denying them citizenship. Stringent restrictions have been placed on Rohingya people’s freedom of movement, access to medical assistance, education and other basic services. Violence broke out in northern Rakhine state in August 2017, when militants attacked government forces. In response, security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation” that ultimately killed at least 1,000 people and forced more than 600,000 to flee their homes. The UN’s top human rights official said the military’s response was "clearly disproportionate” to insurgent attacks and warned that Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya minority appears to be a "textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. When Aung San Suu Kyi rose to power there were high hopes that the Nobel peace prize winner would help heal Myanmar's entrenched ethnic divides. But she has been accused of standing by while violence is committed against the Rohingya. In 2019, judges at the international criminal court authorised a full-scale investigation into the allegations of mass persecution and crimes against humanity. On 10 December 2019, the international court of justice in The Hague opened a case alleging genocide brought by the Gambia. Rebecca Ratcliffe Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

The military operations started after Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts in August.

Though Myanmar says it is ready to start repatriating refugees, many fear returning, and some 300 more families crossed the border in recent days after several houses were burned down in Buthidaung township, said Chris Lewa from the Arakan Project, a monitoring group that closely tracks Rakhine.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s tepid response to the crisis and failure to openly rebuke the military has punctured her reputation as a rights icon.

Myanmar analyst Khin Zaw Win said Richardson’s words could deliver a “much-needed jolt for Aung San Suu Kyi and for the people around her who are not reporting the truth to her.”

Aaron L Connelly from the Lowy Institute for International Policy told AFP that the description of the conversation between Richardson and Aung San Suu Kyi should “finally dispel the myth that she privately holds views which she cannot express publicly”.

Richardson joined the Myanmar board as a private citizen, but the US State Department said the Washington administration shared many of his concerns.

After his trip to Myanmar, the diplomat said he was shocked by the panel members’ disparagement of the media, the UN, human rights groups and the international community.

Richardson could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday.

Fellow members of the advisory board, which included five Myanmar nationals, defended their work on Thursday and denied participating in a whitewashing of the crisis.

“Bill Richardson was making his comments too early and it’s very unfortunate from that angle,” South African national and panel member Roelof Petrus Meyer told reporters in Yangon.