Genocide against Rohingya in Myanmar ongoing: UN investigator

31, Oct 2018

According to United Nations officials, genocide continues to take place against the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Associated Press reported. Marzuki Darusman, who heads the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, recently told reporters that thousands of Rohingya are still escaping to neighbouring Bangladesh, and that the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 who stayed in Myanmar following a military crackdown in late August 2017  “continue to suffer the most severe” repression, the AP said. Yanghee Lee, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said, “The government is increasingly demonstrating that it has no interest and capacity in establishing a fully functioning democracy where all its people equally enjoy all their rights and freedoms”. Several hundred thousand Rohingya fled to Bangladesh after August 2017’s military crackdown that was prompted by attacks on some army posts. However, Lee said that she did “not encourage repatriation”. She said, “Right now, it’s like an apartheid situation where Rohingyas still living in Myanmar … have no freedom of movement,” adding, “The camps, the shelters, the model villages that are being built, it’s more of a cementing of total segregation or separation from the Rakhine ethnic community.” On October 30, AFP reported that Bangladesh and Myanmar had agreed to begin the Rohingya’s repatriation to Myanmar in November. In a report released earlier in 2018, the UN fact-finding mission said that Myanmar’s military’s crimes against the Rohingya had “genocidal intent,” and called for top military officials to be prosecuted.