The situation in Myanmar is a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, the United Nations said on Monday, as the number of Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar for Bangladesh topped 300,000.
The UN warning came as it emerged the Dalai Lama had written to Aung San Suu Kyi urging Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in the mainly Buddhist country.
The Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority, have faced decades of persecution in Myanmar where they are regarded as illegal immigrants.
But since the latest upsurge in violence on August 25, hundreds of thousands have flooded across the border into Bangladesh bringing stories of entire villages burned to the ground by Buddhist mobs and Myanmar troops.
On Monday the UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein accused Myanmar of waging a “systematic attack” on the Rohingya and warned that “ethnic cleansing” seemed to be under way.
“Because Myanmar has refused access to human rights investigators the current situation cannot yet be fully assessed, but the situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” he told the UN Human Rights Council.
Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate, has come in for strong international criticism over the military crackdown on the Rohingya, which began when militants ambushed security forces on August 25.The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar has said the latest violence may have left more than 1,000 dead, most of them Rohingya.
A further 27,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, as well as Hindus, have also fled violence that has gripped northern Rakhine, where international aid programmes have been severely curtailed.
The UN refugee agency says at least 313,000 Rohingya have now arrived in Bangladesh, around a third of the total population of 1.1 million.
The true figure could be even higher – the UN said many new arrivals are still on the move and are therefore left out of the calculations. (AFP)
