Myanmar's Suu Kyi Refrains From Discussing Rohingya Women Being Raped With UN Envoy

Sticking to the orthodox and anti-Rohingya stance, Myanmar's state counselor, Aung San Suu Kyi, refrained from discussing the Rohingya women being raped by the Myanmar military during an interview with a top UN official, according to an internal memo found by the Guardian.

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Pramila Patten, the special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, who went to Myanmar on a four-day trip in mid-December to investigate the issue said her meeting with Suu Kyi lacked "any substantive discussion" on the reports that came out earlier about the women being raped by the military. 

"The meeting with the state counselor was a cordial courtesy call of approximately 45 minutes that was, unfortunately, not substantive in nature," Patten wrote in a letter to the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres last week.

Instead of discussing the crisis,  Aung San Suu Kyi talked about how she would enjoy “a number of good meetings” with senior Myanmar officials, Patten informed. 

Representatives of the military and civilian government also added the atrocities reported by people and advocacy groups were "exaggerated and fabricated by the international community." 

"Moreover, a belief was expressed that those who fled did so due to an affiliation with terrorist groups, and did so to evade law enforcement," she wrote.

Earlier this month, referring to the testimonies of the victims and advocacy groups in the region, Al Jazeera reported that Rohingya women in Bangladesh's Cox Bazaar were being sold as sex slaves. 

A local aid agency in the region also said that girls, as young as 13, were being abducted as part of a surge in trafficking fueled in part after over 600,000 Rohingyas fled a crackdown in Myanmar.

In November, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Executive director of UN Women, warned about the violence women endure in conflict regions. 

Mlambo-Ngcuka said women in conflict zones are constantly at risk as they are exposed to "new types of violence and torture, worse than anything we’ve ever seen before."

"The situation, even if there is not violence, is complex, [because] there are a lot of unaccompanied children, and the girls among those children are destined to be exposed to violence. It has been going on for such a long time and it is not abating yet. We need sustained attention and we need to mobilize more resources in order to help the government in Bangladesh," the UN diplomat added.