Canada seeks intensified UN efforts to resolve Rohingya crisis

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 DHAKA, May 3, 2018 (BSS) – Canadian Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to Myanmar Bob Rae today urged the United Nations agencies and other global forums to intensify efforts to resolve the Rohingya crisis.

“The UN agencies and others have to speak out more . . . The situation is too upsetting to remain silent,” he said in a public lecture at the city’s BRAC Centre auditorium.

Centre for Peace and Justice (CPJ) of BRAC University organized the programme. BRAC University Vice-Chancellor Professor Syed Saad Andaleeb and CPJ Executive Director Manzoor Hasan also spoke on the occasion.

Rae said repartition of the Rohingyas, who have taken refuge in Bangladesh, to their homeland can happen if “we find a way of political solution inside Myanmar” and consensus between the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar.

“If anything is described as a solution, it does not necessarily mean everybody agrees on it… Slowly but surely we began to build up a greater support for the principle that there has to be repatriation with dignity, security and respect to political rights of the Rohingya,” Rae told newsmen after the lecture.

He described the influx of huge number of Rohingya people into Bangladesh as a burden on the country and said it will have ecological, economic, social and political impacts.

Rae said it is not acceptable that the people of Bangladesh would bear the burden alone.

“We all have reasonability to share the burden,” he added. The special envoy said the Canadian government should be expanding its budget for humanitarian assistance.

“We should be making more efforts to engage in the political process,” he said, adding that his country and its government will continue responding positively to the crisis.

Rae said if some countries step up to do more, others will do so.