Arakan News Agency
The United Nations said on Tuesday that the Rohingya Muslims were “subjected to great atrocities in Arakan province in western Myanmar” by the army and extremist Buddhist militias.
Marzuki Darusman, head of the United Nations fact-finding mission in Myanmar, called on the Government to “grant UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar unconditional access to Arakan province.”
In a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva,Darusman stressed that “the Muslims of the Rohingya were subjected to great atrocities in Arakan.”
“Landmines planted on the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh to kill the Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence and persecution towards Bengali territory,” he said.
“More than 400,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh in less than a month and some 200 villages of this Muslim minority in Arakan have been evacuated,” he said.
Darusman appealed to the Human Rights Council to extend the mandate of the mission until September 2018, to continue investigating the violence in Myanmar.
Earlier on Sunday, Myanmar’s government chief, Aung San Suu Kyi, announced the government’s willingness to grant international observers access to Arakan province.
In the first televised speech since the new wave of violence against Rohingya in August, Sochi claimed that military operations in Arakan have been “stalled” since September 5.
Despite reports that contradict Suu Kyi’s account of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims fleeing to Bangladesh, the prime minister claimed that “the majority of Arakan Muslims have not fled the region.”
Earlier in the day, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced that the number of Rohingya refugees who had arrived in Bangladesh to escape persecution in Arakan had reached 421,000 since the beginning of the crisis.
