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ASEAN urged to avoid complicity in Rohingya crisis
ASEAN leaders including Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi are expected to meet this weekend for the 34th ASEAN Summit in Bangkok, during which the Rohingya refugee crisis is expected to be raised as a topic of main concern.
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Flags of many colors: A security officer stands guard during the preparations for the 34th ASEAN Summit in Bangkok on Wednesday. (Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun)
T
he plight of the Rohingya is likely to cast a long shadow over the upcoming ASEAN Summit in Thailand this week, as regional leaders are urged not to become complicit in what rights groups call a proposal for forced or premature repatriation.
Human rights activists and groups lambasted the 10-nation bloc on Wednesday for the failure to address in a commissioned report the root causes of the Rohingya conflict, which has driven hundreds of thousands of people from the Muslim minority into neighboring Bangladesh.
ASEAN leaders including Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi are expected to meet this weekend for the 34th ASEAN Summit in Bangkok, during which the Rohingya refugee crisis is expected to be raised as a topic of main concern.
During the last summit in November, ASEAN leaders instructed its humanitarian assistance and disaster response agency, the AHA Center, to assist Buddhist-majority Myanmar in efforts to repatriate the mostly Muslim refugees.
From that directive emerged a needs assessment report, leaked to the media earlier this month, which critics have attacked for the regional organization’s failure to acknowledge Myanmar military atrocities and the ongoing human rights abuses against the Rohingya.
In a follow-up to the report, ASEAN and the Myanmar government agreed to pursue “low-hanging fruit” such as to have a training program to support the repatriation process once it commences, and to establish a technical working group to look at ways to implement the report’s recommendations.
“ASEAN needs to stop turning a blind eye to Myanmar’s atrocities against the Rohingya, and cease lending legitimacy to the repatriation process. We all know the Rohingya population in Bangladesh and elsewhere won’t be returning home voluntarily until the situation on the ground in Rakhine State dramatically alters,” said Indonesian lawmaker Eva Sundari, a board member of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) in a statement to The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.
