It is an old icon of democracy that finds itself before international justice. Burundian Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi arrived at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Tuesday (December 10th) to defend Burma, accused by other countries of "genocide" against the Rohingya.
Dressed in a traditional Burmese dress, the de facto head of the Burmese government quickly left the car without addressing the media, said an AFP journalist.
The woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 is at the head of the Burmese delegation before the Court, which sits in The Hague, to defend herself, her majority Buddhist country, accused of abuses. against the Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017.
Burma accused of genocide by The Gambia, mandated by the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which believes that Burma has violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a treaty of international law approved in 1948.
The ICJ, the main judicial body of the United Nations, created in 1946 to settle disputes between Member States, holds first hearings from Tuesday to Thursday in this highly sensitive issue.
Since August 2017, some 740,000 Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh to flee the abuses of the Burmese army and Buddhist militias, described as "genocide" by UN investigators.
"Mass murder and rape"
"The genocidal acts committed during these operations were aimed at destroying the Rohingya as a group, in whole or in part, through the use of mass murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence," the statement said. Gambia in its communication to the Court.
"I ask that the world do us justice," said Nur Karima, a Rohingya refugee whose brothers and grandparents were killed in a massacre in the village of Tula Toli in August 2017. "I want to see the convicts to be led to the gallows, they killed us without mercy, "told AFP Saida Khatun, another refugee from Tula Toli.
The Burmese authorities maintain that the military has only reacted to the attacks of the Rohingya rebellion, and that there has been no ethnic cleansing or genocide.
Still cited alongside big names such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi in the not-so-distant past, 74-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi has seen her image tarnished since she defended the generals of the Burma Army.
However, she can boast broad support in her country.
Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to present the defense of Burma on Wednesday, becoming one of the first leaders to personally address the judges of the Court. It only once established that a genocide had been committed: the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 in Srebrenica, Bosnia.
The head of the Burmese government should argue that the ICJ does not have jurisdiction over the case, that the Burmese army was targeting Rohingya rebels, and that the country is perfectly capable of carrying out its own investigations.
With AFP
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