PARIS (Anadolu) – Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called on the global leaders to “act seriously” in order to facilitate the early and safe repatriation of Muslim Rohingya refugees to their homeland in Myanmar.
“The world must act seriously to make sure that these people (Rohingya) can go back to Myanmar soon,” Hasina said in Paris during the Fourth Edition of the Paris Peace Forum, 2021, Anadolu news agency reported.
Her speech at the forum, which was also attended by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and other world leaders, was streamed live by private media outlets.
The Bangladeshi leader is currently in France on a five-day state visit.
“Security risks from the crisis will not just remain confined to our borders,” she warned, referring to the delay in peaceful and dignified repatriation of persecuted Rohingya Muslims to their country as a crisis for the entire region.
“We already see signs of that,” state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha news agency reported.
Over one million stateless Rohingya have been living in the squalid makeshift tents in the country’s Southern Cox’s Bazar district for years.
According to Amnesty International, more than 750,000 Rohingya refugees, mostly women, and children fled Myanmar and crossed into Bangladesh after Myanmar military forces launched a brutal crackdown on the minority Muslim community in August 2017, pushing the number of persecuted people in Bangladesh above 1.2 million.
Since August 25, 2017, nearly 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed while more than 34,000 were thrown into fires, over 114,000 beaten, as many as 18,000 Rohingya women and girls raped, over 115,000 Rohingya homes burned down and 113,000 others vandalized by Myanmar’s state forces, according to a report by the Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA).
Seeking a more global response to the Rohingya crisis, Hasina added that Bangladesh has temporarily sheltered Myanmar’s forcibly displaced nationals to avoid a major regional crisis.
Earlier, she called on French President Emmanuel Macron and stressed him to bring the Rohingya issue to the UN Security Council, where France is a permanent member.