Following Human Rights Watch, a UN High Commissioner for Refugees official has also denounced that ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is under way in the former Burma.
"The Myanmar government wants to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya", at least its military wing — the one that has governed the Asian country in an authoritarian manner since the 1960s. This extremely harsh condemnation was voiced by John Mckissick, the official responsible for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the area. Following Human Rights Watch and various activists and experts, the United Nations has now lent its voice to the same claim.
The UN official spoke from his office in Cox's Bazar, a city in Bangladesh on the border with Myanmar, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have been fleeing for decades. In their homeland, where they are unjustly denied citizenship, around one million Muslim individuals live in conditions of extreme poverty in Rakhine State, in the south-west of Myanmar — or former Burma — a majority-Buddhist country.
Read also: Thierry Di Costanzo. I Rohingya sono figli del suolo birmano
Violence by the Burmese armed forces against the Rohingya has been ongoing since 2012 and has overshadowed the democratic transition that began in 2010. Exactly one year ago, Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in the general elections, and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate became the country's de facto leader. The Obama administration lifted the last remaining sanctions in October, in order to foster economic growth, which has been recorded at 8.6 per cent.
A law introduced by the former military junta, however, prevented Suu Kyi from being elected president. Suu Kyi therefore found herself caught between the pressure of former military figures still in power — even if no longer in uniform — and an out-of-control humanitarian tragedy. According to many analysts and the BBC itself, the champion of democracy did not openly denounce the crimes and is said to have "buried her head in the sand" so as not to alienate the Army and the Buddhist electorate, and to avoid destabilising her young government.
John Mckissick stated: "Security forces are killing men, shooting them, slaughtering children, raping women, burning and looting homes, to force them to cross the river." That is, to flee into Bangladesh across the Naf, the waterway on which boat people venture into the hands of traffickers, paying border guards when they can.
Read also: Rohingya, il popolo della Birmania più perseguitata al mondo
The UNHCR official John Mckissick is referring in particular to the most recent events that unfolded after 9 border guards were killed at the beginning of October. Some Burmese politicians accused a Rohingya militant group of these attacks, although there is no confirmation of its responsibility. The authorities are preventing journalists and humanitarian workers from visiting these areas. Nevertheless, testimony gathered by humanitarian organisations suggests that around one hundred people were killed and hundreds more arrested in the latest wave of violence. In addition, Human Rights Watch has released satellite images in which an estimated 1,200 homes can be counted as having been razed to the ground in the last six weeks alone.