Imran Khan. PHOTO: FILE
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan has, in an open letter to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, expressed serious concern over the ‘genocide’ of the Rohingyas in Myanmar.
“We [PTI] find this continuing silence and complete inaction by the UN on the continuing plight and persecution of the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar a shameful testament to the failure of the UN to fulfil its basic principles of upholding human rights and protecting people from genocide,” the letter written on Friday reads.
My open letter to UN SG asking him to act on Rohingya Muslims' plight. pic.twitter.com/fqkNL03LWp
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) September 8, 2017
It says that the principle of humanitarian intervention was specifically added to the UN mandate in the face of the Rwandan genocide, but the UN has once again failed to protect innocent people from persecution and genocide.
In the letter, the PTI chairman writes that the international community seems to have learnt no lessons from the international appeasement that eventually led to World War II. “In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, it was expected that the UN would assert the principle of humanitarian intervention without discrimination wherever people were threatened with massacre and genocide. Sadly, so far the UN has failed to live up to its own Charter.”
It lamented that it has been heartbreaking to witness the silence of the UN and the international community on the persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar since the 1970s. “The hypocrisy prevalent within the international community on human rights and humanitarian interventions has been acutely evident as the Rohingya crisis has unfolded. Those who sought to give the UN the Right to Humanitarian Intervention have been the most reluctant to exercise this right now that it has been established within the UNO. It is the duty of the UN, and yourself as its secretary general, to ensure the safety of refugees and protection of people from persecution.”
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Khan requests the UN SG to move the UNSC to end the persecution and genocide of Rohingyas within Myanmar and to bring to an end their inhumane plight as starving, disease-ridden refugees were denied basic shelter, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
“The Rohingya crisis is as clear a threat to international peace and security as many in the expanded notion of security now adopted internationally — which goes beyond mere conventional wars.”
He states that the global security is indivisible and the international community cannot be secure when persecution and genocide of people is going on with impunity in one part of the world.
“It is time for the UN to act decisively or forever lose its relevancy as a global body reflecting the will of the people with which the Preamble of the UN Charter begins. It is time to live up to that commitment on which the UNO was founded — in the aftermath of a global appeasement to the genocide of other people in Europe,” the letter insists.
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