UN Rapporteur ‘Satisfied’ with Arakan Tour
By RIK GLAUERT
17 January 2017
17 January 2017
RANGOON — UN Special Rapporteur
to Burma Yanghee Lee said her tour of northern Arakan State was “very useful”
despite a number of “hitches” as she wrapped up her four-day visit to assess
the human rights situation in the conflict-torn area.
“I was granted full access
without security to most of the places I asked for,” she told The Irrawaddy on
Tuesday, adding that there were a couple of places she was not granted access
to.
In a meeting with the state
chief minister U Nyi Pu last week, Ms. Lee and her team had stressed that to
fulfill their mandate they wanted to freely visit Arakan State, also known as
Rakhine.
After coordinated attacks on
border guard posts in October last year, Burma Army “clearance operations” in
northern Arakan have been accompanied by allegations of human rights abuses of
the Muslim Rohingya minority and sent 65,000 northern Arakan State residents
across the border to Bangladesh, according to the UN.
Ms. Lee began her trip to
Arakan State last Friday and visited the Muslim area of Aung Mingalar in state
capital Sittwe, according to state media. Over the weekend and on Monday she
met with officers at police posts that had been attacked on or since Oct. 9.
The rapporteur also visited a
number of Rohingya villages in Buthidaung, Maungdaw, and Rathedaung
townships—visits by foreign visitors are rarely granted to the area, which has
been under military lockdown since October 2016.
Ms. Lee confirmed that she had
visited Rathedaung Township’s Koe Tan Kauk village where footage of police
beating Rohingya villagers in November last year went viral and prompted
disciplinary action against the officers.
Reports surfaced online that
the rapporteur had been “duped” into visiting another village believing it to
be Koe Tan Kauk, which she denied. “I saw a lot of misinformation on Twitter,”
she told The Irrawaddy.
The UN representative had
wanted to meet with representatives from the Arakan National Party (ANP) during
her trip but the ANP reportedly refused, according to local media, stating that
their spokesperson was out of town and that they did not agree with previous
human rights reports from Ms. Lee.
“It’s their choice to meet or
not to meet with me,” she said when questioned by The Irrawaddy.
The UN envoy’s visit coincided
with an announcement on Monday from the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs that the World Food Programme had distributed aid to 4,690
people in northern Maungdaw Township over Jan 13-14. The report stated that
around half of those reached had not received assistance since the military
crackdown begun on Oct. 9 last year.
The UN Special Rapporteur’s
fifth information-gathering visit to the country will end on Jan. 20. Ms. Lee
also traveled to conflict-torn northern Shan and Kachin states where she
expressed frustration at having her travel restricted by Burmese authorities.