Rohingya refugees are still not allowed to return to Myanmar

News24xx.com - Rohingya refugees are still not allowed to return to Myanmar. This is stated by the UN high commissioner for refugees has told the UN Security Council. According to Filippo Grandi, the conditions in Myanmar are not yet conducive for the 66,000 Rohingyas to return home. The refugees fled to Bangladesh after the Myanmar authorities launched a crackdown in the northern state of Rakhine last August.

 

"The cause of their flights has not been addressed, and we have not seen substantive progress in dealing with exceptions and rejection of rights, that have been deepened over the last few decades, rooted in their lack of citizenship," he said.

 

Grandi also said that the UNHCR office has no access to Rakhine, where hundreds of villages have been burned by the Myanmar military.

 

"Humanitarian access it's very limited. UNHCR has no access to the affected areas in the northern part of Rakhine state, outside the city of Maungdaw, since August 2017, and our access to the center of Rakhine has also been limited, "he said.

 

"The presence of UNHCR and access across the country is essential to monitoring the conditions of protection, to providing independent information to refugees, and accompanying them to back home and when they occur."

Grandi says many efforts was made by the government and people of Bangladesh to accommodate Rohingya refugees, but they have warning the conditions hundreds of thousands of refugees especially in the rainy season that starting in March.

 

"We are now in the race against time as a major new emergency tool. We estimate that more than 100,000 refugees live in flood-prone areas or landslides. Tens of thousands of highly vulnerable refugees must be moved immediately," Grandi said.

 

"Their lives are at great risk."

 

After Grandi gave his recommendations to the Security Council, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, praised the UN so far failed to respond to the crisis in Myanmar. Haley, on his part, has criticized Myanmar's leader and the laureate of Nobel Peace, Aung San Suu Kyi because fail to stop violence against Rohingyas.

 

"This council should hold the military to action and pressure Aung San Suu Kyi to acknowledge the terrible acts committed in her country," Haley said.

 

Haley and several other UN ambassadors appealed specifically to arrest two journalists from the international news agency Reuters. Journalists were also arrested while investigating a story about a mass grave in Rakhine.

 

"For the Myanmar government, their ambassador said that the country respects about press freedom. It is said that journalists were arrested because they violated the state secrecy laws," our correspondent says.

Nearly 690,000 Rohingyas have fled from Rakhine and crossed into southern Bangladesh since August 2017, when an attack to security posts by rebels triggered the Myanmar's army to crackdown that the UN says as genocide. The Myanmar government denied the allegations. Since August 2017, the number of refugees fleeing to Bangladesh has dropped, and up to 1,500 people arrived last month, according to the United Nations. Last month, Bangladesh announced it would delay the return of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees amid fears of their security once they return.

 

 

 

 

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