Alwaght- Myanmar’s Buddhist junta has blocked humanitarian access to western Rakhine state, where more than a million minority Rohingya Muslims are in urgent need of aid a month after a powerful cyclone devastated the region, the United Nations said.
Cyclone Mocha brought lashing rain and winds of 195 kilometers per hour to Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh last month, killing at least 148 people in Myanmar.
The cyclone destroyed homes and brought a storm surge to Rakhine, where oppressed Rohingya Muslims live in displacement camps set up after waves of the ruling Buddhist regime violence in 2012 which according to the UN amounted to the ethnic cleansing.
The UN’s humanitarian office (OCHA) said the decision to stop aid access in the already-impoverished state has paralyzed the humanitarian response to Cyclone Mocha and crippled life-saving aid distributions to storm-hit communities.
"Four weeks into this disaster response and with the monsoon season well underway, it is unfathomable that humanitarians are being denied access to support people in need,” UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Ramanathan Balakrishnan said in a statement Monday.
Balakrishnan said it was “yet another devastating setback for more than a million people” in need of assistance.
Last month, the UN launched an appeal for $333 million in emergency funding for the 1.6 million people in Myanmar it said were affected by the storm.
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA told reporters in Geneva on Tuesdays the suspension also raised serious health concerns over possible disease outbreaks, “if we don’t have access and we don’t have the ability to first of all monitor, to survey what the situation is, and of course bring help”.
He called on the junta authorities “to reconsider this decision and re-instate the initial approval for aid distributions and transportation plans”.
Rakhine is home to around 600,000 minority Rohingya Muslims, who are regarded by many there as interlopers from Bangladesh, and are denied citizenship and freedom of movement.
Most of the 148 people who died during the storm are from the minority, according to the junta.
