Rohingya Muslims plead for help at the U.N. to stop the killings in Myanmar

Rohingya Muslims pleaded with the international community at the first United Nations high-level meeting on the plight of the ethnic minority to prevent the mass killings taking place in Myanmar and to help those in the persecuted group lead normal lives.

UNITED NATIONS — Rohingya Muslims pleaded with the international community at the first United Nations high-level meeting on the plight of the ethnic minority to prevent the mass killings taking place in Myanmar and to help those in the persecuted group lead normal lives.

“This is a historic occasion for Myanmar, but this is long overdue,” Wai Wai Nu, the Rohingya founder and executive director of the Women’s Peace Network-Myanmar, told ministers and ambassadors from many of the U.N.’s 193 member nations in the General Assembly Hall.

The Rohingya and other minorities in Myanmar have suffered decades of displacement, oppression and violence, while seeing no action in response to determinations that they are victims of genocide, she said. “That cycle must end today,” Wai Wai Nu said.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has long considered the Rohingya Muslim minority to be “Bengalis” from Bangladesh even though their families have lived in the Southeast Asian nation for generations. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982.

In August 2017, attacks by a Rohingya insurgent group on Myanmar security personnel triggered a brutal campaign by the military that drove at least 740,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh. The military is accused of mass rape, killings and burning villages, and the scale of its operation led to accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide from the international community, including the U.N.