Canada: Myanmar committed ethnic cleansing in Rakhine
Canada’s foreign minister says what has taken place against the Rohingya Muslim community in western Myanmar constitutes “ethnic cleansing.”
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Speaking at a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday, Chrystia Freeland described the atrocities against the Rohingya people in Myanmar’s Rakhine State as “ethnic cleansing.”
Thousand of Rohingya Muslims have been killed in state-sponsored violence that began in late 2016 and intensified in August 2017. Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have also escaped to neighboring Bangladesh since August last year.
Myanmar, however, has constantly denied that ethnic cleansing has taken place, and claimed that its military has been engaged in “legitimate counterinsurgency operations.”
Freeland, a former editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, also said that she was gravely concerned about the imprisonment of two Reuters journalist for covering the violence against the Rohingya people.
“For true democracy to flourish, fundamental freedoms such as freedom of the press must be respected. That is why Canada is gravely concerned by the imprisonment of two Reuters journalists who dared to report on the crimes in Rakhine State,” she said.
The journalist — Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27 — had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men who were buried in a mass grave in Rakhine.
They were arrested last December during a meeting with two police officials over dinner for “possessing important and secret government documents related to Rakhine state and security forces.”
