YANGON, Myanmar (Reuters) — Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers met in Yangon on Monday (December 19) to discuss the violent crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State.
On Friday (December 16), the United Nations human rights office said it was getting daily reports of rapes and killings of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar and independent monitors are being barred from investigating.
Malaysia Foreign Minister Anifah Aman was asked on his way to the meeting whether he expected for an agreement on the issue to be reached.
“I don’t know that there will be such an agreement or not. This is just a discussion among ASEAN member states in brotherly form. So it’s not (about) whether there will be an agreement or otherwise,” he said.
Human Rights Watch has called for ASEAN countries to push towards a resolution on the crisis.
U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said in a statement that the government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, had taken a “short-sighted, counterproductive, even callous” approach to the crisis, risking grave long-term repercussions for the region.
At least 86 people have been killed, according to state media, and the United Nations has estimated 27,000 members of the largely stateless Muslim Rohingya minority have fled across the border from Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh.
