Rohingya issue: India, Myanmar flayed at UN human rights meet

: The UN’s top human rights official on Monday accused Myanmar of carrying out a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya Muslims even as he criticised New Delhi for seeking to deport members of the minority who had fled to India.

Delivering the opening statement at the 36th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the high commissioner for human rights, asked the Myanmar government to stop claiming that the Rohingyas were setting fire to their own homes and laying waste to their own villages.

He said a “brutal security operation” in Rakhine state had resulted in 270,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh, three times more than the number that fled the last operation. He added his office had received multiple reports and satellite imagery of “security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages, and consistent accounts of extrajudicial killings, including shooting fleeing civilians”.

“Because Myanmar has refused access to human rights investigators the current situation cannot yet be fully assessed, but the situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” he added.

Al Hussein also said he was appalled by reports that Myanmar was laying landmines along the border with Bangladesh and official statements that refugees will only be allowed back if they can provide “proof of nationality”. This measure is a “cynical ploy to forcibly transfer large numbers of people without possibility of return”, he said.

He came down heavily on the Myanmar government, stating that its denial on the Rohingya issue was doing great damage to the international standing of a government which, until recently, he said, benefited from immense good will. “I call on the government to end its current cruel military operation, with accountability for all violations that have occurred and to reverse the pattern of severe and widespread discrimination against the Rohingya population.”