‘NOTHING PREPARED ME FOR ROHINGYA SUFFERING’
In an emotional speech at the United Nations Security Council meeting, actor Cate Blanchett implored the world body not to ‘fail the Rohingya’
In her role as a goodwill ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency, actor Cate Blanchett spoke in front of the UN Security Council on Tuesday. The two-time Academy Award winner said that nothing prepared her for “the extent and depth of suffering” she saw when she visited camps in Bangladesh for Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled a violent crackdown by Myanmar’s military.
Blanchett said she heard “gut-wrenching accounts” of torture, rape, people seeing loved ones killed before their eyes, and children thrown into fire and burned alive”.
“I am a mother, and I saw my children in the eyes of every single refugee child I met,” she said, adding, “I saw myself in every parent. How can any mother endure seeing her child thrown into a fire?”
The Rohingya have long been treated as outsiders in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, even though their families have lived in the country for generations. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982, effectively rendering them stateless. They are also denied freedom of movement and other basic rights.
The latest crisis began with attacks by an underground Rohingya insurgent group on Myanmar security personnel, last August, in northern Rakhine State.
Myanmar’s military responded with counterinsurgency sweeps and has been accused of rights violations. This included rape, murder, torture, and the burning of Rohingya homes and villages — leading about 7,00,000 Rohingya to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.
The Security Council meeting on Tuesday commemorated the first anniversary of the crackdown.
Blanchett, who visited refugee camps in Bangladesh in March, said it was important to recall that last year wasn’t the first attack on the Rohingya.
She said that women who were raped by Myanmar security forces are now giving birth to children who are not only stateless but “are likely to carry this stigma for the rest of these lives”.
She urged support for the refugees and Bangladeshi host communities, and implored the Security Council to help the Rohingya return with “a clear pathway to full citizenship”. “We have failed the Rohingya before. Please, let us not fail them again,” Blanchett said.