NAYPYITAW, Myanmar — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson briefly visited Myanmar on Wednesday and urged its two most influential leaders to investigate “credible reports of widespread atrocities’’ by the country’s security forces against Rohingya Muslims.
In a five-hour visit in Myanmar, Tillerson met with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the nation’s military commander, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate and head of the country’s civilian government. He urged both to investigate and halt the violence that has driven more than 615,000 Rohingya to flee over the border to Bangladesh since late August. Less than one-third of the 1.1 million Rohingya who lived in Myanmar last year are thought to remain in the country.
Tillerson called the situation “horrific,’’ and at a news conference after the meeting said that there had been “crimes against humanity.’’ And while he said he advised against “broad-based economic sanctions’’ against Myanmar, he said targeted sanctions against individuals might be called for.
Members of the mostly stateless Muslim minority are still flooding into Bangladesh from Myanmar’s Rakhine state. They bring with them accounts of villages burned to the ground, women raped, and children flung into fires. The accounts have been borne out by human rights investigators and, in the case of the villages, satellite evidence.
A senior United Nations official has called the campaign against the Rohingya a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.’’ And on Sunday, Pramila Patten, a special representative of the UN secretary-general, accused the Myanmar military of systematic sexual violence against the Rohingya, noting that rape is a weapon of genocide.
“The key test of any democracy is how it treats its most vulnerable and marginalized populations,’’ Tillerson said in Naypyitaw, the capital.
“It is the responsibility of the government and the security forces to protect and respect the human rights of all persons within its borders and to hold accountable those who fail to do so.’’
But Suu Kyi has defended Myanmar’s security forces, saying that there should be an investigation into what caused the Rohingya crisis. “We want to find out why this exodus is happening,’’ she said in a speech in September.
Given the widespread testimony from Rohingya refugees about what led them to flee, critics have accused the Nobel laureate of disingenuousness.
At the news conference Wednesday, Suu Kyi defended her statements, saying, “I don’t know why people say I’ve been silent’’ about the Rohingya, and suggesting that perhaps what she has said was not “interesting enough’’ or “incendiary.’’ She thanked Tillerson for having “an open mind.’’
“An open mind is something very rare these days,’’ she added.
Last month, Suu Kyi — who as a civilian leader has no authority over Myanmar’s powerful military, which ruled for nearly half a century — set up yet another commission dedicated to the Rohingya emergency. There are now at least five such panels, and Suu Kyi presides over most of them.
Yet members of her government admit they have not sent any investigators to Bangladesh to listen to the Rohingya’s accounts. Human rights groups fear that, at a minimum, hundreds of Rohingya civilians have been killed. But with international investigators prevented from freely accessing northern Rakhine, evidence is scarce.
Myanmar’s minister for social welfare, Win Myat Aye, who is involved in four of the government’s Rohingya commissions, said Wednesday that he was wary of accusing the military of any atrocities.
“We always used to hear that the military was violating human rights,’’ said the veteran member of the National League for Democracy, whose leaders were jailed and persecuted by the military for decades before they entered a power-sharing government with the army last year. “But we don’t know if these allegations in Rakhine are true or not because I haven’t seen it myself and it’s beyond my capacity.’’
On Monday, the Myanmar military released the results of a monthlong internal investigation that cleared the army of any abuses against Rohingya civilians. Instead, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar armed forces are known, blamed Rohingya “terrorists’’ for violence in Rakhine.
The latest military operation, like an earlier campaign last year, began after Rohingya insurgents attacked security outposts in Rakhine, killing Myanmar forces.
The Tatmadaw’s internal report maintained that soldiers had not targeted any fleeing women or children, a claim disputed by refugees now sheltering in Bangladesh. The inquiry also said that when shooting suspected insurgents, Myanmar forces made sure to only aim below their knees.
Efforts by the United Nations to scrutinize that first wave of violence last year have been foiled by Myanmar authorities, who have denied UN investigators visas to enter the country.
