The head of the Burmese government Aung San Suu Kyi has been before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) since Tuesday, December 10 to represent his country, accused by the Gambia of "genocide" against the Rohingya. According to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991, the African country has set up a "misleading and incomplete picture" at the ICJ on the situation of the Muslim minority, she said Wednesday, December 11, adding that "the genocidal intent "could not be the" only hypothesis ".
"Unfortunately, The Gambia has presented to the Court a misleading and incomplete picture of the situation in Rakhine State," she said in a hearing she is attending to defend Burma, accused of genocide.
The de facto head of the Burmese government admitted to the judges of the Court that the army may have used a "disproportionate force", but that does not prove that it intended to exterminate the Rohingya people, she said. "Certainly under the circumstances, genocidal intent can not be the only assumption".
Aung San Suu Kyi is leading the Burmese delegation to the ICJ. She herself leads the defense of her country, mainly Buddhist, implicated by the Gambia for the massacres and persecutions against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Since August 2017, some 740,000 Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh to escape the abuses of the Burmese army and Buddhist militias, described as "genocide" by UN investigators.
The Gambia has accused Burma of "genocide" from a mandate of 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 international law treaty approved in 1948.
With AFP
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