Rohingya crisis in Myanmar is ‘ethnic cleansing,’ UN says

GENEVA — The United Nations’ top human rights official accused Myanmar on Monday of carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against Rohingya Muslims, hundreds of thousands of whom have crossed into Bangladesh since late August to escape a military crackdown.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said the military’s “brutal” security campaign was in clear violation of international law, and cited what he called refugees’ consistent accounts of widespread extrajudicial killings, rape and other atrocities.

Al-Hussein said the crackdown “resembles a cynical ploy to forcibly transfer large numbers of people without possibility of return,” noting that Myanmar had progressively stripped its Rohingya minority of civil and political rights for decades.

“The situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” he said in a keynote address before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

More than 300,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since Aug. 25, when armed Rohingya militants attacked police posts and a military base in the western state of Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. Myanmar authorities said 15 members of the security forces and 370 militants had been killed in the fighting.

Since then, Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh have told journalists, rights groups and others that soldiers, along with some local residents, had set fire to numerous villages and had butchered Rohingya men, women and children.

Some officials in Myanmar have said that Rohingya had set fire to their own homes and villages. On Monday, al-Hussein called such accusations a “complete denial of reality” that was damaging the international standing of a leadership that had benefited from considerable good will as the country emerged from decades of military rule.

Al-Hussein’s comments added to mounting international criticism of the military’s actions in Rakhine. Some of it has singled out Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of the elected civilian government, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her resistance to the military dictatorship. Suu Kyi does not control Myanmar’s military, but she has yet to criticize its crackdown on the Rohingya.