[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. The Myanmar authorities said 15 members of the security forces and 370 militants had been killed in the fighting.]
By
Nick Cumming-Bruce
 |
|
Rohingya refugees from
Myanmar in late August, after crossing into Bangladesh.
More than 300,000 have
fled a military crackdown.
Credit Adam Dean for The
New York Time
|
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, the United Nations
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.
Mr. 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 United Nations 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.
The 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, Mr.
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.
Mr. al-Hussein’s comments added to mounting
international criticism of the military’s actions in Rakhine. Some of it has
singled out Daw 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. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi does not control Myanmar’s
military, but she has yet to criticize its crackdown on the Rohingya.
On Friday, the Dalai Lama became the latest
Nobel Peace Prize laureate to raise the issue of her silence, following
statements from Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the rights advocate
Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, both of whom called on Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi to
take action.
The Dalai Lama told journalists in
Dharamsala, India, that those who were persecuting Rohingya “should remember
Buddha,” a pointed reminder to the Buddhists who make up a majority of
Myanmar’s population. Some Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar have campaigned for
Muslims to be driven out of the country.
The Buddha “would definitely give help to
those poor Muslims,” the Dalai Lama said.
On Sunday, leaders who had gathered in
Astana, Kazakhstan, for a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation
issued a statement condemning the “systematic brutal acts” against the Rohingya
and asked Myanmar to allow a United Nations fact-finding mission into the
country to investigate.
That mission was established after an earlier
crackdown in Rakhine, in October, also in response to a coordinated attack on
security forces by Rohingya militants. Myanmar’s government has refused to
cooperate with the mission and has said it will not allow members of the group
into the country. The mission is scheduled to report to the United Nations
rights council this month.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation is
currently led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. His wife, Ermine
Erdogan, traveled to Bangladesh with a consignment of humanitarian aid last
week, urging the government in Dhaka to keep its borders open for Rohingya
refugees.
The militant group blamed for the August
attacks, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, declared a unilateral, one-month
ceasefire on Sunday, citing the need to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid
and urging Myanmar’s military to lay down its arms. The government refused,
saying it would not negotiate with terrorists.
In his address on Monday, Mr. al-Hussein said
he was appalled by reports that Myanmar’s military has placed mines along the
border with Bangladesh. Amnesty International said on Sunday that it had
documented “what seems to be targeted use of land mines” by Myanmar’s security
forces at crossing points used by refugees.
The rights group said that one civilian near
the border had been killed and that three people, including two children, had
been seriously injured by mines in the past week.
“This is another low in what is already a
horrific situation in Rakhine,” said Tirana Hassan, Amnesty’s crisis response
director.
