Rohingya tell UN chief of atrocities
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he heard “unimaginable” accounts of atrocities during a visit on Monday to Bangladesh’s refugee camps and called for Myanmar to be held responsible for “crimes” against the Rohingya.
Guterres described the situation for the persecuted Muslim minority as “a humanitarian and human rights nightmare” before touring makeshift shelters crammed with people who escaped a huge Myanmar army operation in 2017 that the UN has likened to ethnic cleansing.
The UN chief heard harrowing testimony of rape and violence from refugees living in the crowded camps, where nearly a million Rohingya have sought refuge from successive waves of violence in Myanmar.
“It is probably one of the most tragic, historic, systematic violations of human rights,” Guterres said in Kutupalong camp, the world’s largest refugee settlement. “Sometimes people tend to forget who is responsible for what happened. So let’s be clear where the responsibility is — it is in Myanmar.
“But it’s true the whole international community was not able to stop [it]. The responsibilities of the crime committed in Myanmar need to be attributed to those who committed those crimes.” The level of “unparallelled” suffering created “an obligation to put pressure on Myanmar for the situation to change there”, Guterres added.
The bulk of the Rohingya in Bangladesh, or about 700,000 people, flooded across the border in August 2017 to escape the violence. They are loathed by many in Myanmar, where they were stripped of citizenship and branded illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite calling Rakhine state their homeland.
Guterres, accompanied by World Bank head Jim Yong-kim, said he heard “unimaginable accounts of killing and rape” during his first visit to the Rohingya camps as UN chief.
“Nothing could’ve prepared me for the scale of crisis and extent of suffering I saw today,” Guterres said on Twitter. “I heard heartbreaking accounts from Rohingya refugees that will stay with me forever.”
The World Bank head said the hardship in the camps was “one of the most disturbing situations we’ve ever seen”.
“I was appalled, but the entire world should be appalled by what we’re seeing,” he said.
A UN Security Council delegation visited Myanmar’s Rakhine state in early May, meeting refugees who gave detailed accounts of killings, rape and villages torched at the hands of the military.
The Myanmar government has vehemently denied allegations by the US, the UN and others of ethnic cleansing.
Bangladesh and Myanmar agreed in November to begin repatriating the Rohingya but the process has stalled, with both sides accusing the other of frustrating the effort.
Fewer than 200 have been resettled, and the vast majority refuse to contemplate returning until their rights, citizenship and safety are assured.
About 100 Rohingya staged a protest just before Guterres’s visit, unhappy about a preliminary UN deal with Myanmar to assess conditions on the ground for their possible return home.
Mohibullah, a community leader for the displaced minority, said he had raised concerns with Guterres about the UN agreement not referring to the Rohingya by name.
Myanmar refers to the Rohingya as “Bengalis” as it does not recognise the Muslim group as native to the country.