Trump urges strong UN action

US president Donald Trump is urging the UN security council to take ‘strong and swift action’ to bring Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis to an end, US vice president Mike Pence said on Wednesday, calling the violence there a threat to the region and beyond.
Pence, speaking at a Security Council meeting on peacekeeping reform, accused the Myanmar military of responding to militant attacks on government outposts ‘with terrible savagery, burning villages, driving the Rohingya from their homes.’
Pence repeated a US call for the Myanmar military to end the violence immediately and support diplomatic efforts for a long-term solution.
‘President Trump and I also call on the security council of the United Nations to take strong and swift action to bring this crisis to an end and bring hope and help to the Rohingya people in their hour of need,’ Pence said.
His remarks were the strongest yet from the US government in response to the violence in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine that began last month and has forced 422,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh, fleeing a military offensive the United Nations has branded ethnic cleansing.
Pence called the violence and the ‘historic exodus’ of Rohingya, including tens of thousands of children, a ‘great tragedy.’
The violence began on Aug 25 when Rohingya insurgents attacked about 30 police posts and an army camp, killing about 12 people.
Unless the violence was stopped, it would only become worse and ‘consume the region for generations to come and threaten the peace of us all,’ the vice president said.
‘The images of the violence and its victims have shocked the American people and decent people all over the world,’ he said.
Pence said the United States welcomed comments by Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a national address that returning refugees have nothing to fear, but Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh said on Wednesday they took little hope from the 1991 Nobel peace laureate’s speech.
‘I have no hope to go back. My documents were stripped from my forefathers decades ago,’ said Shafi Rahman, 45. He said he had arrived in Bangladesh two weeks ago after soldiers and civilian mobs burned his village.
Rights monitors and fleeing Rohingya say the army and Rakhine Buddhist vigilantes responded with violence and arson aimed at driving out the mostly stateless Muslim population, which the UN rights agency called ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.’

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