UN Security Council team visits Rohingya in Bangladesh camps

KUTUPALONG: A UN Security Council team visited Rohingya refugees trapped in the no man's land along the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar Sunday, as it weighs its response to one of the world's worst refugee crises.

Myanmar has faced intense international pressure since the start of a military campaign in August that has driven some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims over the border into Bangladesh, where refugees have provided harrowing testimony of murder and rape by security forces and local mobs.

The UN delegates will interview refugees in the Bangladeshi camps before travelling to Myanmar and meeting civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been denounced in the West for her failure to speak up for the Rohingya.



The council is urging Myanmar to allow the safe return of the Rohingya and take steps to end the decades of discrimination that the stateless Muslim minority has suffered in the Buddhist-majority country.

Rohingya refugees hold placards to members of United nations Security Council team during their visit to Kutupalong refugee camp. PHOTO: AFP

Bangladesh refugee commissioner Mohammad Abul Kalam told AFP that the UN team -- with 26 diplomats from 15 countries -- first visited Konarpara camp, where some 6,000 Rohingya have been trapped on bleak scrubland since the bloodshed began last year.

United Nations Security Council members meet the press after visiting Rohinfya refugee camps in Bangladesh's Ukhia's district on 29 April 2018. PHOTO: AFP

The camp's Rohingya leader Dil Mohammad said the UNSC delegation met and spoke with some women victims of the violence in Rakhine, as well as community elders.

"We told them that we're staying here to save our lives. We're very much eager to go back to our land, provided our security is ensured by the UN," Mohammad told AFP.

Later, the council will also head to the Kutupalong camp where hundreds of Rohingya staged a protest ahead of the visit, holding banners demanding the restoration of their rights in Myanmar. Police dispersed the protesters peacefully, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.

"We want restoration of our citizenship under Rohingya ethnicity. We want security and return of our confiscated land and properties," said Rohingya leader Mohibullah, adding that they would present the delegation with 14 conditions for their repatriation to Rakhine.

Myanmar has said the military operation in Rakhine is aimed at rooting out extremists and has rejected nearly all allegations that its security forces committed atrocities in the state.

Rohingya refugees hold placards to members of United nations Security Council team. PHOTO: AFP

Led by Kuwait, Britain and Peru, the four-day Security Council visit is expected to include a meeting with Bangladesh's Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, as well as a helicopter flight over Rakhine to allow delegates to see the remains of villages torched during the violence.



Kuwait's Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi said the visit was not about "naming and shaming" Myanmar, but that "the message will be very clear for them: the international community is following the situation and has great interest in resolving it."

The high-level 15-member delegation of the UN Security Council talk to Rohingya refugees during their visit to Tombru in the Bangladeshi district of Bandarban on April 29, 2018. PHOTO: AFP

On Friday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for Myanmar's Rohingya crisis to be referred to the International Criminal Court.

"The lack of a UN Security Council resolution has left the Myanmar government convinced that it has literally gotten away with mass murder," HRW executive director Kenneth Roth told reporters in Yangon.