By Joshua Carroll
YANGON, Myanmar
Comments made by Nobel Prize winners who urged Myanmar to stop persecuting Rohingya Muslims are “counterproductive… unbalanced and negative,” the country’s foreign ministry said Sunday.
Myanmar has been under increased scrutiny over its treatment of the minority since thousands fleeing oppression and violence were left stranded at sea following a crackdown on people smugglers in recent weeks.
Desmond Tutu, along with the former president of East Timor Jose Ramos-Horta and the Iranian activist Shirin Ebadi said following conferences in Norway’s capital last week that the Rohingya were facing “nothing less than genocide.”
Business magnate and philanthropist George Soros, who escaped from Nazi occupied Hungary, added that the Rohingya’s situation showed parallels with Nazi genocide.
The Myanmar government refuses to acknowledge the word Rohingya as a legitimate ethnic name, preferring instead the term “Bengali” to stress their belief that the group of some one million people are immigrants from Bangladesh.
In a statement published on the front page of a state-backed newspaper, the Ministry of Foreign affairs said Myanmar “categorically rejected” the comments made in Oslo.
“They criticized and turned a blind eye to Myanmar’s efforts on rebuilding trust among two communities in Rakhine State,” the statement said, referring to the western region of the country where tens of thousands of Rohingya are confined to camps after Buddhist rioters attacked villages in 2012.
“Myanmar has been extending its full cooperation with countries in the region to solve the issue of boat people,” the statement added.
A conference on the crisis attended by regional leaders in Thailand on Friday yielded few results.
The United Nations repeated its calls for Myanmar to address the exodus of Rohingya from the country by giving the stateless minority basic rights and a path to citizenship. But Myanmar complained of “finger pointing,” and called for cooperation between countries.
