UN urges Myanmar to 'properly' probe atrocities against Rohingya

Rasa - A UN Security Council envoy says Myanmar must conduct a "proper investigation" into alleged atrocities against the persecuted Rohingya Muslims in northwestern state of Rakhine.

News ID: 437442

Date: 01 May 2018 - 23:00

RNA - Britain's Ambassador to the UN Karen Pierce made the remarks after UN delegates visited Rohingya refugee camps in Rakhine and Bangladesh.

"In order to have accountability there must be a proper investigation," Pierce told reporters in Naypyidaw, the capital city of Myanmar.

The UN Security Council team arrived in Bangladesh on Friday for the first time to hear the sufferings of some 700,000 Muslim refugees who have escaped a campaign of violence, rape and arson by Myanmar’s military, which began some nine months ago.

Several women and girls recounted their ordeals to Pierce and pleaded for the UN's help.

Pierce, who is among the 15-member delegation, explained a “combination of enormous distress and sympathy for what those poor women and those poor children have been through and are still going through.”

During the trip to Myanmar on Monday the UN envoys met both de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who heads a military accused by the UN of "ethnic cleansing."

Suu Kyi has done virtually nothing to stop crimes committed by the military against the Rohingya. The Nobel Peace Prize winner is under pressure by the international community for failing to use her position to prevent crimes against the Rohingya.

Myanmar’s army chief, in a posting late Monday on his official Facebook page, also denied that his forces committed rape and other sexual abuses against Rohingya Muslims during a government-sanctioned crackdown on the minority, despite widespread and documented evidence to the contrary.

He also repeated the official line that Myanmar was ready to take back the refugees who could be verified as residents, according to a repatriation deal with Bangladesh.

Several months after the deal was signed, no refugees have returned. They demand guarantees of safety, the right to return to their original villages and the granting of citizenship.

According to Press TV, Bangladesh accuses Myanmar of buying time by pretending to cooperate over the repatriation for the benefit of the international community.

Mansour Ayyad Al-Otaibi, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the UN, has warned that it will take "two or three years" for the refugees to be repatriated. "There is a need to speed up the process," Otaibi said, adding that conditions must be "safe and dignified" for return.

Myanmar has driven out two thirds of its roughly 1.5 million Rohingya population since 2012.

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