Yangon: The UN
children’s agency UNICEF has called on Myanmar’s government to release Rohingya
children detained as part of a sweeping military campaign in Rakhine state.
More than 600 people
were arrested in an army crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in the north of the
restive state. The operation was launched after deadly attacks by militants on
police posts in October.
Rohingya escapees in
neighbouring Bangladesh, where more than 70,000 have fled, gave UN
investigators accounts of beatings, torture and food deprivation inside the
jails.
Minors are among
those detained. UNICEF’s deputy
executive director Justin Forsyth said he had given the country’s de facto
civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi details of around a dozen youngsters being
held in Buthidaung prison.
“There are some
children that are detained in prison, so those are the cases that we’re
raising,” he told AFP late on Saturday at the end of a brief trip to Myanmar.
“Any child that’s
detained is an issue for us.”
Nobel Laureate Suu
Kyi and Myanmar’s army chief both recognised “that there’s an issue here” but
made no firm committment for their release, he added.
Government spokesman
Zaw Htay declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Sunday.
The UN Human Rights Council
has agreed to send a mission to Myanmar to probe allegations that troops and
police raped, killed and tortured Rohingya in their months-long campaign.
Myanmar has rejected
the accounts collected by UN investigators in the Bangladesh refugee camps, who
said the crimes could amount to ethnic cleansing.
“I think ethnic
cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening,” Suu Kyi
said in an interview with the BBC last week.
Myanmar’s police and
the military have both launched separate probes to investigate the deaths of at
least eight people in custody in northern Rakhine.
UN rights envoy for
Myanmar Yanghee Lee said some 450 people were being held in Buthidaung prison
when she visited in January, most without access to lawyers or their families.
Myanmar has long
faced criticism for its treatment of more than one million Rohingya, who are
vilified as illegal “Bengali” immigrants and forced to live in apartheid-like
conditions even though many have lived in the country for generations.