Trudeau presses Suu Kyi on Rohingya
OTTAWA • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday to express “deep concerns” over the treatment of Rohingya Muslims and other ethnic minorities in her country.
The phone call followed a chorus of cries for Canada to revoke the honorary citizenship it granted Suu Kyi in 2007.
The mass exodus of Rohingya fleeing Myanmar in just under three weeks is now triple the number of refugees who have tried to enter Europe across the Mediterranean so far this year, leaving aid agencies overwhelmed.
An estimated 370,000 have escaped from Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state to overcrowded Bangladeshi refugee camps since Aug. 25, compared with 128,012 people seeking to cross the Mediterranean since January.
Myanmar’s government has admitted that 176 out of 471 ethnic Rohingya villages are now empty.
Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been widely criticized in recent weeks for not doing more to protect the Rohingya. She says her government is fighting a militant insurgency.
According to a summary of the call between Trudeau and Suu Kyi issued by the Prime Minister’s Office, Trudeau stressed the urgent need for Myanmar’s military and civilian leaders to take a strong stand in ending the violence and providing access to the United Nations and humanitarian groups.
Trudeau also underscored “the particular importance” of Suu Kyi’s role as “a moral and political leader.”
The two discussed “the need to defend and protect the rights of all minorities” and Trudeau offered Canada’s support to help build “a peaceful and stable society in Myanmar,” the summary said.
The Myanmar government said yesterday that Suu Kyi will skip next week’s UN General Assembly meetings, and give a domestic speech to address the crisis.
Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general, also called on Myanmar authorities yesterday to end the violence and acknowledged the situation is best described as ethnic cleansing.
Rohingyas have said their homes were set on fire and people shot, slashed or burned to death. “This is the fastest growing refugee crisis in the past five years, with serious human rights concerns,” a UNHCR spokesman told The Telegraph.
Chris Lom, a UN aid worker in the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar, on the front line of the humanitarian disaster, said people were “very vulnerable, traumatized,” while relief agencies struggled.
“UN agencies and the government were expecting the possibility that as many as 100,000 more people could come across when there were already 600,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh,” he told UN News. “But I don’t think anyone expected a mass exodus like this.”