Call for UN Help to Stop Myanmar Violence

Iran's top diplomat expressed huge concerns over the alarming situation of the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar, calling on the United Nations to act swiftly to stop the atrocities being committed against the minority people and restore their basic rights.

In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif urged the UN to undertake measures for addressing the longstanding grievances and the plight of Rohingya.

"The UN support for de-escalating violence, ensuring humanitarian assistance for the people in need and finding a sustainable solution for the crisis is essential and urgently needed," he wrote, adding that Iran is ready to help find a durable solution to the crisis.

The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim group in the majority Buddhist country and make up around one million of the total 50-million population.

Myanmar's northwestern state of Rakhine, one of the poorest in the country that is home to the Muslim minority, has witnessed a fresh wave of violence since August 25, when some of the Myanmarese Army posts came under attack allegedly by Muslim groups.

The army troops mounted a crackdown on the Rohingya in retaliation, which has left hundreds dead and forced nearly 270,000 of the impoverished community to flee to Bangladesh.

Zarif lamented that the Myanmar government has so far failed to meet minimum demands for protecting the Muslim community and bringing to justice those responsible for the atrocities.

"Should the systematic and extensive violation of the basic human rights of the Rohingya Muslims be left unattended, it would encourage extremism and instigate violence even beyond the borders of Myanmar and become a destabilizing factor for the whole region," Zarif said in the letter carried by Fars News Agency.

The Myanmar government brands Rohingyas "illegal immigrants" from Bangladesh, and its repressive tactics as well as attacks by the government-allied Buddhist extremists have left thousands of people from the minority group dead and forced thousands others to flee their homes since 2012.

Earlier, Malaysian Premier Najib Razak said Myanmar's de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, must step in to prevent the “genocide” of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, as he criticized the Nobel laureate for her inaction.

More than a dozen Nobel laureates also criticized Suu Kyi for failing to uphold the human rights of Rohingya Muslims, calling for immediate action to avoid “ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

Many demonstrations across the world have called on the Norwegian Nobel Committee to revoke the Nobel Peace prize granted to Suu Kyi because of her implicit complicity.