Bill Richardson Quits Myanmar Advisory Board on Rohingya. Who Cares?

Longtime Democrat politico Bill Richardson quit an advisory board set up by Myanmar to assess the trouble with the Rohingya in Rakhine State. Apparently it was after a spat with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. According to Hannah Beech and Rick Gladstone in "U.S. Adviser Rebukes Aung San Suu Kyi: ‘I Don’t Want to Be Part of a Whitewash’ ":

“She has developed an arrogance of power,” Mr. Richardson said by telephone during a layover in Tokyo on his way back to New Mexico from Myanmar. “I’ve known her a long time and am fond of her, but she basically is unwilling to listen to bad news, and I don’t want to be part of a whitewash.”

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine State in western Myanmar for Bangladesh over the past five months. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has declined to speak out forcefully against the Myanmar military’s campaign of execution, rape and arson against the Rohingya, which the United Nations and United States have labeled ethnic cleansing.

Mr. Richardson said that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had “exploded” at him when he raised the detention of two Reuters journalists, U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, who are facing up to 14 years in prison under the country’s Official Secrets Act after they began investigating a mass grave of Rohingya in northern Rakhine. 

“Her face was quivering, and if she had been a little closer to me, she might have hit me, she was so furious,” Mr. Richardson said.

Richardson is grandstanding. Clearly he joined the board so he could quit, garner the headlines and discredit Myanmar.

According to the Reuters story, "Richardson quits Myanmar's 'whitewash' Rohingya crisis panel," by Bill Tarrant:

Before Richardson quit the advisory board had 10 members, including five from overseas, chaired by former Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary in the Clinton administration, also had harsh words for Surakiart.

The board chairman, he said, was not “genuinely committed” to implementing recommendations regarding the issues of Rohingya safety, citizenship, peace, stability and development.

“He parroted the dangerous and untrue notion that international NGOs employ radicals and that humanitarian agencies are providing material support to ARSA,” Richardson said, referring to Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army militants. [This is what Richardson is trying to put the kibosh on. This is how the U.S. conducts its secret wars. The U.S. doesn't want this publicly acknowledged.]

Surakiart was traveling with other members of the board in Rakhine and did not respond to requests for comment.

Another board member, former South African Defence Minister Roelof Meyer, told Reuters the visit to Rakhine had been “very constructive”.

“If anybody would say that we are just a rubber stamp or a voice on behalf of the government that would be completely untrue, unfair,” he said. “We haven’t done any recommendations so far.”

Other members of the board, which also includes British doctor and politician Lord Darzi of Denham and speaker of the Swedish parliament Urban Ahlin, were not immediately available for comment.

Richardson said he declined to join the advisory board’s tour of a new repatriation camp in Rakhine State on Wednesday, instead traveling to Yangon.