President Rodrigo Duterte on Saturday scored Myanmar’s State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi for her apparent failure to resolve the abuses against the minority Rohingya Muslim population.
Duterte, who chairs the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations this year—pinned at the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s apparent silence on the ongoing refugee crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine state that has sent 146,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh in the past two weeks.
“Look at Burma. Suu Kyi is a Nobel prize winner,” Duterte said. “But the Rohingyas, they are being brutalized and they’re without any citizenship.”
Responding to the “hullabaloo” of criticisms thrown against his human rights record—Duterte said that he won’t get cowed by any criticism as policemen were being killed by drug addicts.
“Etong mga human rights—Shut up,” he added.
Suu Kyi, who spent years under house arrest before her party won a 2015 election, is facing growing criticism over the treatment of the Rohingya amid a bloody military crackdown following attacks by insurgents.
Earlier this week, Myanmar’s de facto leader claimed her government had “already started defending all the people … in the best way possible.”
“We know very well, more than most, what it means to be deprived of human rights and democratic protection,” a statement quoted Suu Kyi as saying. “So we make sure that all the people in our country are entitled to protection of their rights as well.”
Recent violence in Rakhine state has prompted an average of 15,000 Rohingya refugees to flee across the border with Bangladesh each day since Aug. 25, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Myanmar’s military has accused the militants of “terrorist” atrocities against non-Muslim civilians as well as burning down their own villages.
However, Rohingya people and rights groups accuse the army of a brutal campaign of reprisals against civilians, with one UN official last year suggesting that crimes against humanity has occurred.