UAE’s Gargash says Rohingya crisis needs an ‘effective’ plan of action
The UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs yesterday said the Rohingya crisis required an effective plan of action, as many feared that refugees returning to Myanmar would be kept in settlements indefinitely.
“The Rohingya issue is an Islamic and humanitarian one,” Dr Anwar Gargash tweeted. “The ethnic cleansing that afflicts this minority group presents a number of urgent challenges and requires an effective plan of action, which addresses their return, identity and safety.”
“The UAE’s humanitarian efforts to ease the suffering of the Rohingya has included providing necessary treatment to more than 132,000 refugees, of which 78,000 are women and children, living in the Cox’s Bazar camps in Bangladesh. Our efforts continue.”
Myanmar’s military chief has said that Rohingya refugees who returned to the country will be safe as long as they stayed in the model villages built for them.
About 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar to Bangladesh after the military launched a brutal crackdown on insurgents in August, which the US and the UN have called ethnic cleansing.
Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed to repatriate refugees to Rakhine state last year but Rohingya are reluctant to return to a country without guarantees of safety and basic rights such as freedom of movement.
Gen Min Aung Hlaing told a visiting delegation from the UN Security Council in the capital Naypyidaw on April 30 that there was no need to worry about the Rohingya if they kept to the villages.
Gen Aung Hlaing referred to members of the stateless minority as “Bengalis”, reflecting a widespread belief in Myanmar that the Rohingya are immigrants from Bangladesh despite a long presence in Rakhine.
The army chief also cast doubt on the allegations raised by refugees in Bangladesh, many of whom shared stories of extrajudicial killings, arson and rape.
“Bengalis will never say that they arrived there happily,” he said. “They will get sympathy and rights only if they say that they face a lot of hardships and persecution.” He said that issue had been exaggerated.
The UN has said conditions are not right for the refugees to return, despite Myanmar’s insistence that it is ready.
The government has built transit camps that can accommodate tens of thousands of people and a much smaller number of houses to replace the fire-blackened villages where Rohingya used to live.
The minority community has been persecuted in Myanmar for decades and Rohingya have lived in what rights groups have called apartheid-like conditions, with severe restrictions on movement and access to health services.