UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday that the Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, was “deeply disturbed” by reports of the discovery of five mass graves of civilians from the Muslim minority of Rohingya in the province of Arakan in western Myanmar.
“These are disturbing reports and we are very concerned,” Stéphane Dujarric said at a news conference at the UN headquarters in New York. “It underscores the need for humanitarian access to Arakan. Unfortunately, we have not been able to do so yet.”
World media, including the Associated Press and the BBC, reported on the discovery of five previously undisclosed mass graves in the village of Goduu Pyin in Myanmar.
Video recordings of mobile phones showed members of the military and security forces in Myanmar massacring civilians. Testimonies of dozens of survivors currently living in the Cox-Bazar camps in eastern Bangladesh confirmed the burial of mass graves in the area.
In the first international response to these reports, the Special Envoy for the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, called for the need for a special investigation.
“Let us go to a fact-finding mission and access international media to areas in Arakan state, where the Rohingya lives,” Lee told reporters in Seoul.
It also stressed that the military’s “violent” military operations against the Rohingya “bore the hallmarks of genocide”.
The ongoing crimes against Rohingya, committed by the army and extremist Buddhist groups for years, have resulted in the use of some 826,000 Muslims in Bangladesh, including 656,000 who have fled since August 25th, according to the United Nations.
