The Federal Government has condemned the “horrendous human suffering” of the Rohingya ethnic minority in Myanmar.
Some 370,000 Rohingyas have fled the country’s western state of Rakhine into neighbouring Bangladesh in recent weeks, according to the UN.
Violence broke out on August 25, after Rohingya fighters attacked police posts, prompting a military crackdown.
UN human rights chief Zeid Raad al-Hussein said on Monday that the security operation in Rakhine appeared to be “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
Foreign Affairs minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, in a statement yesterday, said Nigeria expressed deep regret at the desperate human right situation in the Rakhine State.
He said the crisis is “very reminiscent of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1995.”
“The Federal Government condemns the horrendous human suffering caused by what is now confirmed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in his statement today, to be a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya people,” the minister said.
He called on the United Nations to invoke the principle of the “Responsibility to Protect” and intervene in Myanmar to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing and create the conditions for the safe return and rehabilitation of the fleeing Rohingya people to their motherland.
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