Cii Radio| Ayesha Ismail| 02 November 2017| 12 Safar 1439
Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi arrived on her first visit to conflict-battered northern Rakhine State on Thursday, an official said, an unannounced trip to an area that has seen most of its Rohingya Muslim population forced out by an army campaign.
Suu Kyi, a nobel laureate who leads Myanmar’s pro-democracy party, has been criticised by the international community for failing to use her moral power to speak up in defence of the Rohingya.
Some 600,000 of the stateless minority have fled to Bangladesh since late August carrying accounts of murder, rape and arson at the hands of Myanmar’s army, after militant raids sparked a ferocious military crackdown.
The UN says that the crackdown is tantamount to ethnic cleansing, while pressure has mounted on Myanmar to provide security for the Rohingya and allow people to return home.
“The state counsellor [Suu Kyi’s official title] is now in Sittwe and will go to Maungdaw and Buthidaung too. It will be a day trip,” government spokesman Zaw Htay told AFP, mentioning two of the epicentres of the violence without elaborating on her schedule.
It was not clear if Suu Kyi would visit some of the hundreds of Rohingya villages torched by the army – allegedly aided by ethnic Rakhine Buddhist locals – or if she would be taken to see remaining clusters of the Muslim group, who are living in fear and hunger surrounded by hostile neighbours.
Thousands of others are believed to still be camped on a beach near Maungdaw, awaiting boats to Bangladesh in increasingly parlous conditions.
Crisis continues
The Rohingya are hated in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they are denied citizenship and widely dismissed as illegal “Bengali” immigrants.
The Rohingya’s legal status is at the crux of communal tensions, with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists stating that Rohingya are foreign interlopers.
A Rohingya resident of Maungdaw town appealed to Suu Kyi to reconsider foisting a controversial national verification card (NVC) on the minority.
The card grants them limited rights to residence in Myanmar, yet does not recognise them as Rohingya and, therefore, an ethnic group with citizenship rights.
The Muslim group state the NVC is another bureaucratic attempt to erase their identity, forcing a shaky temporary legal status onto the Rohingya in a region where they claim generations of ancestry.
“We can not do anything with this NVC card, so we do not want to receive it,” the resident said, requesting anonymity in fear of reprisals.
“We are not Bengalis from Bangladesh. We are Rohingya living here for generations,” he added.
Aid groups say the risk of major outbreaks of disease is high while they struggle to deliver food and basic supplies to the unprecedented number of refugees.
Source – TRT World
