UN Blames Myanmar for Failing to Protect Rohingya Refugees

Rasa - Two United Nations special advisers said Myanmar has failed to meet its international obligations to protect the Rohingya Muslims from atrocities and condemned the "ethnic cleansing" in which the religious minority are fleeing for their lives.

News ID: 433252

Date: 19 October 2017 - 22:07

RNA - "Once again, our failure to stop atrocity crimes makes us complicit. When will we live up to our countless promises of ‘never again’?" the advisers asked, TeleSUR reported.

The statement issued by the UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Adama Dieng along with the special adviser on the responsibility to protect, Ivan Simonovic, called out the South East Asian country for its failure to prevent crimes against humanity.

"Despite warnings issued by us and by many other officials, the government of Myanmar has failed to meet its obligations under international law and primary responsibility to protect the Rohingya population from atrocity crimes," said the joint statement.

"The international community has equally failed its responsibilities in this regard," the advisers added.

A recent UN report also blamed Myanmar for permanently displacing the Rohingya community.

"In some cases, before and during the attacks, megaphones were used to announce: 'You do not belong here, go to Bangladesh. If you do not leave, we will torch your houses and kill you'," the report said.

It's also emerged that the UN food agency, the World Food Programme, WFP, retracted a critical document from its July assessment which had warned that 80,000 children under five years of age living in majority-Muslim areas were "wasting", a potentially fatal condition of rapid weight loss.

Just a month ahead of the purge targeting the minority Muslim community in Myanmar's Rakhine state, an area with the largest Muslim population in the country, the 6-page report was replaced with a joint statement by the Myanmar government and WFP. It said they were "collaborating on a revised version." The document disappeared from the U.N. website and the agency said it has been removed "following a request by the government to conduct a joint review."

Since August, 582,000 Rohingya have fled the Myanmar army's campaign.

Recent aerial footage shows thousands of Rohingya on the embankments of Bangladesh's borders, awaiting their entry into squalid, muddy camps with no access to basic amenities.

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