Extremist Burmese monk Wirathu calls UN envoy a ‘Lady of the Night’
Extremist Burmese monk Wirathu is back in the headlines, once again for all the wrong reasons. The man who appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’ called the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Burma, Yanghee Lee, a ‘bitch’ and a ‘Lady of the Night’ while addressing a crowd in Yangon, Friday.
The rogue monk’s outburst was apparently in response to comments Lee made earlier in the day emphasizing the need for the rights of Rohingya Muslims to be respected.
The video, posted on the Democratic Voice of Burma‘s YouTube channel, shows Wirathu saying:
We have already made public the Race Protection Laws. But this bitch [Burmese: Kaungma], without studying it, kept on complaining about how it is against human rights. Just because some loudmouthed women say so. Can this bitch really be from a respectable family background? [Audience: 'No!'] Don’t assume you are a respectable person, just because you have a position in the UN. In our country you are just a Lady of the Night. You may offer your arse to the kalars [a derogatory term used for some Muslims]… but you will never sell off our Arakan State.
Wirathu’s tirade came on the final day of Lee’s 10-day visit to Burma (also known as Myanmar) to assess the human rights situation in Rakhine and Northern Shan States. Earlier Friday she had held a press conference in which she emphasized that: “The rights of Rohingya people must be protected, promoted and upheld.”
The minority Rohingya Muslims have been subject to discrimination and sectarian violence recent years at the hands of the Buddhist majority. Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled, while an estimated 135,000 are being held in camps in Rakhine State along “for their own safety”. Wirathu, as leader of the 969 nationalist movement, has been widely blamed for inciting violence against Muslims.
Asian Correspondent writer Francis Wade interviewed Wirathu in 2013. This is an excerpt from what he wrote about that experience:
The interview with Wirathu took close to two hours, much of it taken up with his lengthy observations about the Islamic peril afflicting Burma – mobs of rapists, thieves and proselytizers terrorizing villages as they swept inland from the western border with Bangladesh. Some statements were so outlandish they drew incredulous smiles from us interviewers. Afterwards he handed over a batch of DVDs and booklets that he said explained his position in greater detail. We left the building, walked past the enlarged and gory photos of Buddhists supposedly killed by Muslims, and towards the taxi.
http://asiancorrespondent.com/129936/ex ... y-a-whore/