GENEVA: Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in Myanmar risks getting bracketed with “pariah states” like North Korea and Syria over its refusal to grant visas to a UN team investigating the plight of Rohingya Muslims, activists said on Wednesday.

The civilian government of the Nobel peace laureate said on June 30 that the three investigators designated by the UN’s Human Rights Council were not welcome, insisting it was conducting its own probe into alleged atrocities against the minority group.

That refusal amounts to “a slap in the face to victims who suffered grave human rights violations by Myanmar’s state security forces”, John Fisher, Geneva director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

“Does Aung San Suu Kyi’s government really want to be included in a very small and ignominious club of countries that reject Human Rights Council decisions?” he said.

“North Korea, Eritrea, Syria, and Burundi are human rights pariah states that obstructed the work of independent, international investigations into alleged rights abuses, and it would be a travesty for a democratically elected, National League for Democracy-led government in Myanmar to do the same.”

On Monday, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley also called on the Myanmar government to give visas to the UN fact-finding mission, arguing the “international community cannot overlook what is happening in Burma”.

The north of Myanmar’s Rakhine state has been under lockdown since October, when the military launched a campaign to hunt down Rohingya militants who staged deadly attacks on police posts.

More than 90,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee their homes since the crackdown began, according to UN estimates.

A UN report in February said the campaign against the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship and other rights in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, “very likely” amounted to war crimes.

In May, the Geneva-based rights council appointed Indira Jaising of India, Radhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka and Christopher Dominic Sidoti of Australia to serve as the three members of the UN mission.

The mission was ordered to “urgently” investigate abuses reportedly committed by the security forces, particularly in Rakhine state where troops have been accused of raping, torturing and murdering members of the Rohingya community.

Buddhists protest UN human rights envoy visit

While Myanmar has denied entry to the UN fact-finding mission, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, Yanghee Lee, arrived in Rakhine state for an information gathering trip.

Protesters from the state’s ethnic Rakhine Buddhist community shouted and held signs as Lee passed in her car in Sittwe, the state capital, calling her unfair and unwanted.

Lee has criticised the government’s treatment of the Rohingya minority, who face severe discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Lee is on a 12-day visit to Myanmar at the invitation of the government during which she is to discuss human rights issues with political and community leaders and civil society representatives.

After her arrival in Sittwe, she visited a prison where hundreds of Rohingya men are detained on suspicion of having links with the assailants who carried out the October attacks.

“Yanghee Lee has been here in Rakhine three or four times but every time she goes back and writes a report about her trip or has press conferences and never mentioned any good thing about either Rakhine people or the Myanmar government,” said Than Tun, a leader of the Rakhine Buddhist community.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2017