Yesterday, the UN appointed a three-member team to investigate human rights crimes against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan state. The team will be headed by Indian lawyer Indira Jaising & includes Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy & Australian Christopher Dominic Sidoti. They will head up an entire staff of human rights investigators.

It isn’t certain that Aung San Suu Kyi & the military junta will allow entry to the investigators. In fact, it has a snow balls’ chance in hell of being allowed to land in Myanmar. But there are 75,000 new Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh who were eyewitnesses to & victims of ethnic cleansing that the team can gather testimony from as well as hundreds of thousands in diaspora in Bangladesh, India, Jammu, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, & elsewhere.

One heartening thing about this investigative team is that Indira Jaising has represented Bhopal victims before the Indian Supreme Court & much more recently spoke at the presentation event releasing “Citizen’s report on the violations of democratic rights in the Kashmir valley in 2016.” She was not part of the 25-member team from India that investigated Indian army human rights crimes in Kashmir nor a signatory to the report but spoke at the New Delhi event where it was introduced.

The three members will be meeting in Geneva to develop a strategy for proceeding in an investigation sure to be obstructed every inch of the way by the now thoroughly discredited Suu Kyi.
Meanwhile, the truth about the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya is widely known & beyond dispute so we can continue to educate about what is happening with them & how they are organizing wherever they are against genocide & for human, democratic, & refugee rights.

(Photo by Turjoy Chowdhury/NurPhoto via Getty Images)