BANGLADESH: Bangladesh’s foreign minister said on Sunday that genocide was being waged in Myanmar’s violence-racked Rakhine state, triggering an exodus of nearly 300,000 Muslim Rohingya to his country.
“The international community is saying it is a genocide. We also say it is a genocide,” AH Mahmood Ali told reporters after briefing diplomats in Dhaka.
Ali met Western and Arab diplomats and the heads of UN agencies based in Bangladesh to seek support for a political solution and humanitarian aid for the Rohingya.
He told the diplomats that some 300,000 of them had fled to Bangladesh in the past two weeks, taking the total number of such refugees to over 700,000.
“This is creating a huge challenge for Bangladesh in terms of providing shelter as well as other humanitarian assistance to them,” a foreign ministry statement said.
At least two diplomats who attended the briefings said the minister told them as many as 3,000 people may have been killed in the latest round of violence.
The United Nations says 294,000 bedraggled and exhausted Rohingya refugees have arrived in Bangladesh since attacks by Rohingya militants on Myanmar security forces in Rakhine on August 25 sparked a major military backlash.
Tens of thousands more are believed to be on the move inside Rakhine.
Mainly Buddhist Myanmar does not recognise its stateless Muslim Rohingya community, labelling them “Bengalis” — illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
International aid programmes in Rakhine have been severely curtailed as the fighting tore through parts of the state.
Nearly 300,000 Rohingya have fled violence churning through Rakhine state into Bangladesh, the United Nations said Saturday, as Myanmar’s government for the first time offered humanitarian aid to members of the Muslim minority still inside the country.
The UN is braced for a further surge of arrivals in Bangladesh with tens of thousands more believed to be displaced in Rakhine, fleeing burning villages, the army and ethnic Rakhine mobs — who Rohingya refugees accuse of attacking civilians.
Myanmar denies the allegations, instead saying the Rohingya militants who sparked the crisis with deadly attacks on police posts on August 25 have spread fear by killing civilians and torching thousands of homes.
Exhausted, wounded and traumatised Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh each day since violence erupted, with the young and old carried over hills and muddy fields in days-long treks or after treacherous boat journeys.
Bangladeshi authorities are planning to build a camp that could house a quarter of a million people.
But they have also urged Myanmar to stem the exodus by providing ‘safe zones’ for the Rohingya inside Rakhine.
“Some 290,000 Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh since August 25,” Joseph Tripura, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency, told AFP.
There were an estimated 1.1 million Rohingya, who are reviled as illegal immigrants and refused citizenship by Myanmar, living in Rakhine state.
Around a third of that number have fled since October when a new Rohingya militant group launched its first raids, sparking a crackdown by Myanmar’s army.
Rights groups say the sheer volume of testimony by refugees alleging rape, murder and arson points to a brutal crackdown, in keeping with a systematic campaign to force the Rohingya out of the country. – AFP
