Ex-UN chief Annan: Get Myanmar refugees home and not to camps
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged Myanmar to make sure the half-million Rohingya Muslim refugees who have fled in the last two months can go home, and not go to camps.
Myanmar's government needs to "create conditions that will allow the refugees to return with dignity and with a sense of security" and help them rebuild in violence-wracked Rakhine state, said Annan, who recently headed a commission on the crisis there, reports AP.
"They should not be returned to camps," he said after addressing an informal, private Security Council meeting on the issue. "They need assistance to get their homes back."
Myanmar's UN mission didn't respond to a request for comment on Friday's session. The country's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, said Thursday that she had created a committee to oversee all international and local assistance in Rakhine and that the impoverished state needs development. Roughly 1 million Rohingya make up a long-persecuted minority in the Southeast Asian country. The Buddhist majority regards them as having migrated illegally from Bangladesh, although many Rohingya families have lived in Myanmar for generations. They were stripped of their citizenship in 1982.
After earlier waves of Rohingya flight, about 120,000 live in camps outside Rakhine's capital, Sittwe. In an unprecedented exodus, more than 500,000 Rohingya have fled from Rakhine to neighboring Bangladesh since August 25, when security forces clamped down after the latest in a series of attacks on police posts by a Rohingya militant group. Many houses were burned in the crackdown, and Rohingya refugees have described rape, looting and abuse.