UN General Assembly calls on Myanmar to stop military campaign against Rohingya Muslims

Rasa - The United Nations General Assembly has called on Myanmar to halt its military campaign against Rohingya Muslims.

News ID: 435484

Date: 25 December 2017 - 20:48

RNA - On Sunday, a resolution forwarded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) was adopted by a vote of 122 to 10 with 24 abstentions.

It calls for Myanmar to grant aid workers access and to give Rohingya Muslims full citizenship rights.

The resolution also calls on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to assign a special envoy to the country.

China, Russia, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Belarus, Syria and Zimbabwe voted against the resolution.

Backed by Myanmar’s government and Buddhist majority, the military launched yet another heavy-handed crackdown against the Muslim minority in Rakhine State on August 25, using a number of armed attacks on military posts as the pretext.

Over that past three months, government troops, apart from raping, have been committing killings, making arbitrary arrests, and carrying out mass arson attacks to destroy houses in predominantly-Rohingya villages in Rakhine.

Only in its first month, the clampdown, called by the UN and prominent rights group an “ethnic cleansing campaign,” killed some 6,700 Rohingya Muslims, including more than 700 children, according to Doctors Without Borders.

More than 655,000 Rohingya Muslims have so far fled the predominantly-Buddhist Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh since then.

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