The UK Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has demanded that Aung San Suu Kyi must “stand up and condemn” the Rohingya crisis as he welcomed a new Amnesty International report on the issue in a statement in the UK Parliament today (Nov 21, 2017).
Johnson told British MPs during questions in the House of Commons that he had spoken to the Myanmar leader at least three times in recent weeks and called on her to heed the calls from the international community to take action to protect the population forced to flee from violence to neighbouring Bangladesh.
“Aung San Suu Kyi is a great moral leader and we still salute her for her fight for democracy. But it is absolutely vital that she stands up and condemns the military actions in the Rakhine province of Burma. So far she has failed to do so,” Johnson said.
The foreign minister also congratulated the government of Bangladesh on “the energy put in coping with this appalling crisis” and said that the over 600,000 Rohingyas must be given clarity about their citizenship and equal treatment for their safe return to Myanmar from refugee camps.
In its latest report titled 'Caged without a roof', human rights body Amnesty International has found that the Rohingya people in Myanmar are trapped in a vicious system of state-sponsored, institutionalised discrimination that amounts to “apartheid”.
It accuses Myanmar security forces of killing Rohingya people, torching whole villages to the ground, and driving more than 600,000 to flee across the border into Bangladesh.
The two-year investigation reveals how authorities severely restrict virtually all aspects of Rohingyas’ lives in the Rakhine State and have confined them to what amounts to a ghetto-like existence where they struggle to access healthcare, education or in some areas even to leave their villages. The current situation meets every requirement of the legal definition of the crime against humanity of apartheid.
“The Myanmar authorities are keeping Rohingya women, men and children segregated and cowed in a dehumanising system of apartheid. Their rights are violated daily and the repression has only intensified in recent years,” said Anna Neistat, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research.
In northern Rakhine State, many see no choice but to travel to Bangladesh to access the health care they need, but this trip can often be prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest families.
One man in his 50s said: “I wanted to go to Sittwe hospital for medical treatment, but it’s forbidden, the hospital staff told me I couldn’t go there for my own safety and said I needed to go to Bangladesh for treatment. It cost a lot of money."
Amnesty International has, through a thorough legal analysis of this extensive body of evidence concluded, that the Myanmar authorities’ treatment of the Rohingya amounts to apartheid, defined as a crime against humanity under the Convention against Apartheid and the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court.
