Arakan News Agency
The United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh’s coastal town of Cox’s Bazar on Saturday.
The Dhaka Tribune reported that Lee interacted with refugees and listened to their accounts of violence carried out against them allegedly by the Myanmar Army.
Officials from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and other foreign aid institutions were also present at that time.
Lee was also supposed to visit her native Myanmar later on, but the government there unexpectedly banned her from visiting the country.
After this visit, she will leave for Thailand on January 24.
Bangladesh and Myanmar on Tuesday finalised an agreement, which will facilitate the repatriation of the Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh.
Rohingyas are a Muslim minority ethnic group in Myanmar. They have been regarded by many majority Buddhists as illegal migrants from Bangladesh.
Also, they have been long persecuted by the Buddhists and the security forces.
As of December 2017, an estimated 6,55,000 Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh to avoid the persecution from the security forces that started in Myanmar’s Arakan state in August last year.
The United Nations has called the violence against civilians ‘ethnic cleansing’, but the Myanmar government has rejected claims like these.
