Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar persecution pour into Bangldesh Photo: Saikat Biswas/UN Migration Agency
Britain and Sweden have requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council against the backdrop of a growing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, where security forces are accused of perpetuating ethnic cleansing of Rohingya minority population.
The meeting on Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis will take place on Wednesday amid an international outcry against the bloody crackdown on the minority Muslim community.
The announcement øf the council’s meeting came hours after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid bin Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein denounced Myanmar’s brutal operation in Rakhine, warning it amounted to “ethnic cleansing.”
The country’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has defended the military’s operation as part of the “legitimate duty to restore stability” in the western state after a number of armed attacks on police and army posts there on August 25.
Recently, Buddhist monks staged an anti-Rohingya demonstration, reflecting the nation’s complete apathy toward the minority population and disregard of all international human rights norms.
Reports say hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims, who are denied citizenship by the state and have suffered years of persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, have been forced to flee the country in the past fortnight following a brutal crackdown the government describes as a “cleansing operation.”
A petition has already collected hundreds of thousands of signatures calling for Suu Kyi’s Nobel title to be revoked.
Fellow Nobel laureates including Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai have also criticized the Myanmarese leader’s stance on the ongoing violence, urging her to take action to defend the Rohingya’s rights.
Critics have blamed Kyi for complicity in the atrocities against the Rohingya, who are looked down on by the majority Buddhists in the country as illegal migrants from Bangladesh.
The UN Security Council met behind closed doors in late August to discuss the violence, but there was no formal statement.
Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar has said the latest wave of violence may have left more than 1,000 dead, most of them Rohingya Muslims.
The UN says over 370,000 Rohingya Muslims have already fled Myanmar. This has sparked a humanitarian crisis in neighboring Bangladesh, where refugee camps are already overcrowded and food and other aid are in short supply.
Most of the refugees have walked for days in harrowing journeys across rivers and through jungle, arriving sick, exhausted and in desperate need of shelter, food and water.
Bangladesh has said it would start registering all new arrivals and place them in a new refugee camp until their status is determined.
According to Amnesty International and Bangladeshi officials Myanmar military has planted landmines to harm the fleeing Rohingya refugees, many of whom arrive in Bangladesh with serious injuries.
The flow of desperate Rohingya fleeing across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh is unprecedented in terms of volume and speed, United Nations humanitarian agencies said today, amid calls for international support for the emergency response.
About 370,000 people have crossed the Bangladeshi border in the last two and a half weeks, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
