It’s textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ in Myanmar - UN
GENEVA - The top U.N. human rights official yesterray denounced Myanmar’s “brutal security operation” against Muslim Rohingyas in Rakhine state which he said was “clearly disproportionate” to insurgent attacks carried out last month.
Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein, addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, said that more than 270,000 people had fled to Bangladesh, with more trapped on the border, amid reports of the burning of villages and extrajudicial killings.
“I call on the government to end its current cruel military operation, with accountability for all violations that have occurred, and to reverse the pattern of severe and widespread discrimination against the Rohingya population,” Zeid said. “The situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Meanwhile, communal tensions appeared to be rising across Myanmar yesterday after two weeks of violence in Rakhine state that have triggered an exodus of about 300,000 Rohingya Muslims, prompting the government to tighten security at Buddhist pagodas.
A mob of about 70 people armed with sticks and swords threatened to attack a mosque in the central town of Taung Dwin Gyi on Sunday evening, shouting “this is our country, this is our land”, according to the mosque’s imam, Mufti Sunlaiman.
“We shut down the lights in the mosque and sneaked out,” the mufti, who was in the mosque at the time, told Reuters by phone.
Tensions between Buddhists and Muslims have simmered since scores were killed and tens of thousands displaced in communal clashes accompanying the onset of the country’s democrat- ic transition in 2012 and 2013.
But after ARSA attacks on police posts last October, tensions have risen. In Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, Buddhist nationalists raided two madrassas in April and forced authorities to close them down on the grounds they did not have a permit to operate as a place of worship.
In May, several nationalists led by the Patriotic Monks Union raided flats in a Yangon district with a large Muslim population, igniting scuffles that were only broken up when police fired shots into the air.