By Press TV
The United Nations (UN)’s human rights chief has
expressed strong suspicion that “acts of genocide” may have been carried out
against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar since August 2017.
Addressing the UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday, Zeid
Ra’ad al-Hussein further said that reports about the bulldozing of sites in
Myanmar pointed to a “deliberate attempt by the authorities to destroy evidence
of potential international crimes, including possible crimes against humanity.”
“A recent announcement that seven soldiers and three
police officers will be brought to justice for the alleged extra-judicial
killing of ten Rohingya men is grossly insufficient,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled
Myanmar since its military launched a bloody campaign against them across the
western Rakhine State in late 2016 and intensified it in August last year.
The refugees have settled at squalid camps in a region in
Bangladesh known as Cox’s Bazar. There, they have been recounting the horrific
violence they were exposed to back in Rakhine, which the government has
blockaded.
According to the witness accounts, soldiers and Buddhist
mobs have been murdering and raping the Rohingya, and torching their villages.
Satellite imagery obtained by rights groups have shown entire villages
bulldozed in what seems to be an attempt at destroying crime scenes.
The UN has formerly floated the idea that the atrocities
constitute “ethnic cleansing.” On Tuesday, a UN official used that term
definitively to describe the violence.
UN: Myanmar continuing ‘ethnic cleansing’ of
Rohingya http://presstv.com//Detail/2018/03/06/554503/UN-Myanmar-ethnic-cleansing-Rohingya-UN-Andrew-Gilmour
Bangladesh casts doubt about deal with
Myanmar
Meanwhile, a senior Bangladeshi cabinet minister accused
Myanmar of obstructing efforts to repatriate nearly 750,000 Rohingya Muslim
refugees, saying that it was unlikely the displaced people would ever be able
to return to their homeland.
Finance minister A.M.A Muhith said on Tuesday that a
repatriation deal signed between Myanmar and Bangladesh in November last year
would likely fail despite the Bangladeshi government’s official position that
the refugees must eventually go back.
“I do not believe the Rohingya can be sent back,” he
said. “You can speculate that very few will return to Burma (Myanmar). The
first reason is that Burma will only take a few and secondly is that the
refugees will never return if they fear persecution.”
Rights groups and the UN have warned that conditions for
the return of the refugees are not in place.
The refugees living in camps in southeastern Bangladesh
have also resisted the idea, fearing they will not be safe if they return to
Rakhine.
An estimated 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were killed by
security forces joined by Buddhist mobs in the first month of the crackdown
alone, according to Doctors without Borders.