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Add to Preferred SourcesThe international community must do more to support nearly one million Rohingya refugees living in “heartbreaking” conditions in Bangladesh, the UN chief said on July 2.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres made the appeal during a visit to the world’s largest refugee site, a vast settlement in southeast Bangladesh near the Myanmar border. Accompanying him under driving monsoon rains was World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.
“My appeal to the international community is to step up to the plate and to substantially increase the financial support to all those who are in Bangladesh to protect … assist and support the Rohingya refugees,” Guterres told reporters at a news conference.
He and Kim are at the end of a two-day visit to Bangladesh to garner more support for refugees and their hosts. They were joined on the trip by UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi and UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem.
The Secretary-General said more funds are urgently needed as a key US$950 million humanitarian aid plan remains just 26 percent funded. The shortfall is worsening conditions for hundreds of thousands of refugees living in fragile conditions since fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar last August.
“It means that we do not have the capacity to provide the kind of basic education that would be necessary,” he said. “That means that malnutrition is prevailing in the camp, that means that the conditions of water and sanitation are far from being ideal.”
The high-level delegation met with Rohingya refugees during a tour of the sprawling settlement, which is now is home to more than 700,000 women, men, and children. Many have reported widespread killings and abuses in Myanmar in recent months.
“It is impossible to visit these camps without breaking our hearts with the suffering of the Rohingya people,” Guterres told reporters. “First of all listening to the terrible stories of massive violence, of killing, rape, and torture, of all the villages, burned.”
The delegation had previously held bilateral meetings with authorities in Dhaka, including with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, to open discussions on the medium-term support needed by the refugees and the communities hosting them.
The Secretary-General thanked the Bangladeshi government and people for keeping their borders open and providing basic support to refugees at a time when other countries around the world had closed frontiers.
The visit came days after an announcement by the World Bank of half-a-billion US dollars in grant-based support to help Bangladesh address the needs of the refugees and their hosts in areas including health, education, water, and sanitation.
Kim said: “We have to stand in solidarity with them so that they can live a life of dignity, and their demand for such basic things that just about everyone else in the world enjoys.”
The Rohingya are a stateless Muslim minority who have endured decades of repression and social exclusion. Current conditions in Myanmar do not allow for a safe and dignified return for refugees. UNHCR and UNDP recently agreed with the Government of Myanmar to begin creating those conditions and preserve the right of Rohingya refugees to return if they decide to do so.
Original source: UNHCR
Published on 2 July 2018