Alwaght- A senior United Nations official has warned that Myanmar's persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority has the potential to spark regional conflict.
Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has reiterated while in Indonesia on Monday that acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing may have occurred in the campaign of violence against Rohingya that sparked an exodus of nearly 1 million people to neighboring Bangladesh.
“Myanmar faces a very serious crisis with a potentially severe impact on the security of the region,” Zaid said in a speech to a rights conference at Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“It is sometimes said that today's human rights violations will become tomorrow's conflicts,” he said. “If the Rohingya crisis were to spark a broader conflict based on religious identities, the ensuing disputes could be a cause for great alarm.”
Zeid said the spasms of violence that began in August and sparked the refugee crisis were the culmination of five decades of discrimination and violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar's Rakhine state.
Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym MSF says that at least 6,700 members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority group were killed in ongoing state-sponsored ethnic only in a period of one month beginning on August 25.
His remarks follow the publication of a report last week about mass graves of Rohingya in Myanmar's crisis-hit Rakhine state, where government troops have been accused of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the minority.
The stateless Rohingya have been the target of communal violence and vicious anti-Muslim sentiment in mainly Buddhist Myanmar for years. Myanmar has denied citizenship to Rohingya since 1982 and excludes them from the 135 ethnic groups it officially recognizes, which effectively renders them stateless. They have long faced discrimination and persecution with many Buddhists in Myanmar calling them "Bengalis" and saying they migrated illegally from Bangladesh, even though they have lived in the country for generations.
