Yangon (AFP) -
Pressure tightened on Myanmar Monday as a rights group urged world leaders to
impose sanctions on the country's military, which is accused of driving out
more than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims in an orchestrated "ethnic
cleansing" campaign.
The mass exodus of
Rohingya refugees to neighbouring Bangladesh has billowed into an humanitarian
emergency as aid groups struggle to provide relief to a daily stream of new
arrivals, more than half of whom are children.
There are acute
shortages of nearly all forms of aid, with many Rohingya huddling under tarps
as their only protection from monsoon rains.
Myanmar's government
hinted Sunday that would not take back all who fled across the border, accusing
those refugees of having links to militants whose raids on police posts in
August set off the army backlash.
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Any moves to block
the refugees' return will likely inflame Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik
Hasina, who will press the UN General Assembly for more global pressure on
Myanmar to repatriate all of the Rohingya massing in shantytowns along her
border.
Human Rights Watch
also called for the "safe and voluntary return" of the displaced as
it urged governments around the globe to punish Myanmar's army with sanctions
for the "ongoing atrocities" against the Rohingya.
- Call for arms
embargo -
"The United
Nations Security Council and concerned countries should impose targeted
sanctions and an arms embargo on the Burmese military to end its ethnic
cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims," the group said in a
statement.
It called on the UN
General Assembly to make the crisis a priority, urging countries to issue
travel bans and asset freezes on Myanmar officers implicated in the abuses, as
well as expand arms emargoes.
"Burma's senior
military commanders are more likely to heed the calls of the international
community if they are suffering real economic consequences," said John
Sifton, HRW's Asia advocacy director.
Myanmar's government
has defended the military campaign as a legitimate crackdown on the Rohingya
militants, who first emerged as a fighting force last October.
On Sunday Myanmar's
Information Committee accused those who fled to Bangladesh -- more than a third
of the Rohingya population -- of working in cahoots with the Rohingya militia,
a rag-tag group of fighters armed with mostly rudimentary weapons.
"Those who fled
the villages made their way to the other country for fear of being arrested as
they got involved in the violent attacks," the statement said.
"Legal
protection will be given to the villages whose residents did not flee," it
added.
The violence has
gutted large swaths of northern Rahkine in just over three weeks, with fires
visible almost daily across the border from the Bangladesh camps.
Some 30,000 ethnic
Rakhine Buddhists and Hindus have also been displaced by the unrest.
While the world has
watched the refugee crisis unfold with horror, there is little sympathy for the
Rohingya inside mainly Buddhist Myanmar.
Many Buddhists
revile the group and have long denied the existence of a Rohingya ethnicity,
insisting they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.