New Rohingya safety plea,
PM Hasina says refugees must be protected on their return home
Bangladesh has called on the international community to help ensure the Rohingya can return home safely by creating a secure zone in Myanmar.
At the Global Compact on Refugees panel event yesterday, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina recalled her experience of displacement while offering recommendations that would allow the Rohingya to go home.
“In Bangladesh, we are faced with the largest forced movement of more than 1.1 million traumatised Rohingya,” Ms Hasina said. “They have been forcibly displaced from their homes in Rakhine state of Myanmar where they had been living for centuries.
“We must not forget that every refugee deserves a safe return to their homeland. The displaced people from Myanmar must be able to return home with dignity, safety and security.
She said that by accepting the Rohingya into Bangladesh, her country had prevented the crisis from spilling into the rest of the continent.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and chair of the panel, Filippo Grandi, thanked Ms Hasina for sharing her experience, which he called a reminder that the event was “about people and not just about numbers and politics”.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a stateless mainly Muslim minority in Myanmar, fled to Bangladesh after a campaign of violence by the country’s security forces in August last year.
Myanmar’s powerful military generals have been accused by the UN of carrying out a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” through their persecution of the Rohingya.
Ms Hasina said Myanmar must abolish its discriminatory laws against the Rohingya, offer them a pathway to citizenship and, if needed, create a safe zone inside the country to provide protection.
She said that the country must accept the recommendations of a fact-finding mission of the UN Human Rights Council last month, which said that military leaders should be held accountable for their crimes in Rakhine.
Only hours earlier, Myanmar’s commander-in-chief warned against other nations interfering in his country’s affairs.
Min Aung Hlaing said in remarks published on his website yesterday that “talks to meddle in internal affairs” would cause misunderstanding.
The comments were the first time he has spoken in public since the UN mission’s report called on him and five other generals to be prosecuted for atrocities carried out last year, which include allegations of mass killings and gang rapes.
Myanmar denies wrongdoing, saying its soldiers carried out a legitimate operation to expel terrorists after attacks by Muslim militants on police and army posts.
Also at the UN meeting, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu urged developed countries to do more to assist with the numbers of refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.
“Turkey is home to the largest refugee population in the world,” said Mr Cavusoglu, who stepped in at the meeting for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“We have provided shelter to anyone needing protection. We have provided education, health and psychological services to anyone who needs them.”
He said that Turkey and Russia had a prevented a “huge tragedy” by agreeing to create a demilitarised buffer zone in Syria’s Idlib province, which would separate government troops from rebel forces.
Myanmar’s army chief said the United Nations had no right to interfere in the country’s affairs, a week after a UN investigation called for him and other senior generals to be prosecuted for genocide.
The actions of Gen Min Aung Hlaing and other leading officers against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority have attracted widespread condemnation.
His defiant response is the military’s first public reaction since a UN fact-finding mission urged the UN Security Council to refer Myanmar’s officers to the International Criminal Court.
It came as the UN General Assembly prepares to discuss the crisis in New York.
No country, organisation or group has the “right to interfere in and make decisions over sovereignty of a country”, Gen Min Aung Hlaing told troops on Sunday, according to the military-run newspaper Myawady.
“Talks to meddle in internal affairs [cause] misunderstanding,” he said.
UN investigators went into horrific detail about the atrocities committed by troops last year in “clearance operations” against the Rohingya, which forced more than 700,000 of the stateless Muslims to flee across the border to Bangladesh.
The military denied all wrongdoing, justifying its crackdown as a legitimate way of rooting out Rohingya militants.
In his speech Gen Min Aung Hlaing repeated the view widely held in Myanmar that the Muslim minority are outsiders, referring to them as Bengalis.