UN in Myanmar watched from the sidelines as danger rose for Rohingyas: Report  

The UN leadership in Myanmar has been accused of looking the other way while tensions rose in Rakhine state to seal the fate of Rohingyas, says a report by the BBC.

News Deskbdnews24.com
Published : 29 Sept 2017, 06:59 AM
Updated : 29 Sept 2017, 10:45 AM

At the centre of the apparent failure is Renata Lok-Dessalien, the top UN official in Myanmar, who stayed on as resident coordinator despite damning assessments from within the UN.

Sources inside the UN and other aid groups talked to the BBC about how Dessallien, in the four years leading up to the current crisis:-

1. Tried to stop human rights activists travelling to sensitive Rohingya areas

2. Attempted to shut down public advocacy on the subject

3. Isolated staff who tried to warn that ethnic cleansing might be on the way.

UN activities under Dessallien, the Canadian head of the United Nations Country Team or UNCT, has been called "glaringly dysfunctional" in a memo prepared for Secretary General Antonio Guterres in April. 

In the weeks following the memo, the UN announced that Dessallien was being "rotated", but not over her performance. However, three months have passed but she still holds the job because the Myanmar government rejected her proposed successor.

UN Resident Coordinator in Myanmar Renata Lok-Dessallien

The UN has been making bold statements, appearing at the forefront of crisis as hundreds of thousands of the Rohingyas fled army violence in Rakhine state.

Since the Aug 25 crackdown, over 500,000 new Rohingya arrivals have joined the approximately 400,000 refugees who were already living in cramped, makeshift camps in Bangladesh.

But former UN officials who worked within Myanmar's system said the UN operation there could not have prevented the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, because it had for long been censoring itself to avoid conflicts with the Myanmar government.

UN press releases even avoided using the term Rohingya, which had become taboo for its staffers. That fell in line with the Myanmar government, which never calls the stateless Muslims 'Rohingyas', preferring 'Bengalis' instead.     

Dessallien, since she took office in 2014, has 'frozen' staffers out of their jobs for warning about the signs of an imminent humanitarian crisis. The Rohingya issue was even left out in closed door meetings of the UN in Myanmar, a probe into its activities have found.

"Multiple sources in Myanmar's aid community have told the BBC that at high-level UN meetings in Myanmar any question of asking the Burmese authorities to respect the Rohingyas' human rights became almost impossible."

So instead, the UN leadership decided to focus on a long-term strategy, and together with the international community it set long-term development goals for Rakhine. They hoped prosperity would "lead to reduced tension between the Rohingyas and the Buddhists."

But when a UN commissioned probe began checking its priorities in Myanmar in 2015, it damningly criticised the strategy in report 'Slippery Slope: Helping Victims of Supporting Systems of Abuse'.

"The UNCT strategy with respect to human rights focuses too heavily on the over-simplified hope that development investment itself will reduce tensions, failing to take into account that investing in a discriminatory structure run by discriminatory state actors is more likely to reinforce discrimination than change it," the BBC quoted a leaked copy of the report.

"She has a fair view and is not biased," Shwe Mann, a former senior general and close ally of Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, told the BBC.

"Whoever is biased towards the Rohingyas, they won't like her and they will criticise her."