UN envoy visits Rohingya camps in Bangladesh

COX’S BAZAR: UN human rights envoy Yanghee Lee was on Tuesday visiting Rohingya refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, where thousands have taken shelter after fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar.

The refugees, most of whom are now living in squalid camps in the Cox’s Bazar district which borders Myanmar’s Rakhine state, have brought harrowing accounts of systematic rape, killings and torture at the hands of the military.

Lee, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the issue, was in the coastal district on Tuesday after holding talks with government ministers in Dhaka about the crisis.

There was no immediate comment from the UN, but the Bangladesh foreign ministry said Dhaka had expressed concern over the presence of the Rohingya in the country.

“She (Lee) is now visiting the camps to talk to the refugees,” Bangladesh foreign ministry spokeswoman Khaleda Begum said.

Meanwhile, Myanmar police are investigating the murder of four people in northern Rakhine state, the government said on Tuesday.

The corpses of three women and a man were found buried in a field near Luuphanpyin village in Maungdaw township last Thursday, according to the office of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi. “A man’s dead body was found with deep wounds in the left armpit and the head cracked open,” her office said in a statement.

“Two of the three women had deep wounds on their backs and broken spines. The other had no (visible) internal injuries,” the statement added without detailing who the victims were.

The bodies were discovered the day after the government announced the end of army “clearance operations” in the north of the ethnically divided state that were launched to find militants who attacked police posts in October.

The United Nations has said this was used as a cover for a four-month crackdown in which security forces butchered hundreds of Rohingya Muslims.

Some 73,000 of them have since fled to southern Bangladesh. UN investigators who interviewed escapees say the violence is so severe it “very likely” amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. For months Myanmar has curtailed access to the strip of land near the Bangladesh border and vehemently rejected similar allegations collected by rights groups and journalists.

But the UN’s report has struck a nerve, piling pressure on Suu Kyi’s young government.

Myanmar’s persecution of the more than one million Rohingya who live in Rakhine state has long drawn international criticism.