The nation has ordered the head of Timor-Leste’s diplomatic mission to leave the country within seven days, state media quoted the foreign ministry as saying in an escalating row over a criminal complaint filed by a rights group against Myanmar’s armed forces.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since 2021, when the military ousted the elected government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, sparking a wave of anti-junta protests that have morphed into a nationwide civil war.
Myanmar’s Chin state Human Rights Organization (CHRO) last month filed a complaint with the justice department of Timor-Leste, alleging that the Myanmar junta had carried out war crimes and crimes against humanity since the 2021 coup.
In January, CHRO officials also met Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta, who last year led the tiny Catholic nation’s accession into the Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean), of which Myanmar is also a member.
CHRO filed the complaint in Timor-Leste because it was seeking an Asean member with an independent judiciary as well as a country that would be sympathetic to the suffering of Chin state’s majority Christian population, the group’s executive director Salai Za Uk said.
“Such unconstructive engagement by a Head of State of one Asean Member State with an unlawful organisation opposing another Asean Member State is totally unacceptable,” the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar quoted the foreign ministry as saying yesterday.
In early February, CHRO said Timor-Leste’s judicial authorities had opened legal proceedings against the Myanmar junta, including its chief Min Aung Hlaing, following the complaint filed by the rights group.
Myanmar’s foreign ministry said Timor-Leste’s acceptance of the case and the country’s appointment of a prosecutor to look into it resulted in “setting an unprecedented practice, negative interpretation and escalation of (public) resentments”. — Reuters
