UN report on Rohingya crisis

The warning carried in a recent UN report is pretty loud and clear: as many as 600,000 Rohingya Muslims still living in Myanmar face a “serious risk of genocide”. They are the ones who failed to escape the August 2017 military-led offensive in the Aung San Suu Kyi’s homeland. It is understandable, therefore, why nearly a million Rohingya refugees — who managed to find shelter in Bangladesh two years back — prefer the inhuman and insecure camp life there to a return journey to Myanmar. For many in these squalid camps, Bangladesh still feels like paradise, compared to Myanmar. Thus, the repatriation deal signed between Myanmar and Bangladesh, the country that hosts most of the Rohingya refugees, in November 2017 has been literally dead ever since.

The UN report issued in Geneva validates the repatriation fears of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, stressing that the “deplorable” and “deteriorating” situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine state makes it “impossible” for the fleeing population to return. The report prepared by a fact-finding mission of the world body after interviewing nearly 1,300 witnesses says sexual and gender-based violence by the Myanmar military “remains a prominent feature of conflicts” in Shan and Kachin states. The mission report says that the evidence gathered by it has been passed to a new investigative mechanism for Myanmar which will support any future prosecution in international courts.

The Myanmar military offensive against Rohingya is a textbook example of ethnic cleansing with soldiers involved in rape, murder, burning down of entire villages, planting landmines, and using civilians as slave labour. The sheer barbarism being endured by these stateless people cannot be overemphasised. The UN report must not be rendered a mere file material, and must help wake up the world to what is regarded as the gravest crimes against civilians under the international law.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2019.

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