ISTANBUL: Turkey will send 1,000 tons of aid to Myanmar to help Rohingya Muslims after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke with the Asian country’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a spokesman said.
Erdogan had condemned escalating human rights violations against the Rohingya minority during the phone call earlier in the day, Turkish presidential sources said.
“After the president’s conversation with his Myanmar counterpart... permission was given for 1,000 tons of aid to be sent initially,” Erdogan spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said in a statement.
The United Nations said 123,600 Rohingya had crossed into neighboring Bangladesh in the past 11 days following a spike in fighting between militants and Myanmar’s military in strife-torn western Rakhine state, which raised fears of a humanitarian disaster.
The latest violence, which began last October when a small Rohingya militant group ambushed border posts, is the worst Rakhine has witnessed in years, with Erdogan last week accusing Myanmar of “genocide” against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Unverifiable testimony from those who have fled Myanmar has alleged tit-for-tat mass killings and villages being torched by the army, Buddhist mobs and Rohingya militants.
The Rohingya are reviled in Myanmar, where the roughly one million-strong community are accused of being illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Kalin said Turkey’s international aid body known as the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) would provide rice, dried fish and clothing working with the Rakhine administration, as well as medicine and health products..
The spokesman said TIKA would be the first foreign aid agency to access the region since the violence began.
“At the first stage, 100,000 (Rohingya) families on both sides of the (Myanmar-Bangladesh) border will receive aid,” Kalin said, adding military helicopters would be used because of concerns over safety.
Erdogan has stepped up diplomacy and spoken on the phone with Muslim leaders and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres seeking ways to solve the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar.
In his phone call with Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner of Myanmar’s junta, Erdogan said growing human rights violations against the Rohingya “deeply concerned” the entire world, sources from his office said.
Suu Kyi has come under fire over her perceived unwillingness to speak out against the treatment of the Rohingya or chastise the military.
Erdogan said Turkey “condemns terror and operations against innocent civilians,” adding that the developments in Myanmar had turned into a “serious humanitarian crisis which caused worry and resentment.”
The Turkish leader had previously said he would bring up the issue at the next UN General Assembly in New York later this month.
A delegation led by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu with the head of TIKA is expected to visit on Thursday the Bangladeshi border town of Cox’s Bazar to visit camps and surrounding areas where Rohingya Muslims have fled, the spokesman said.
Turkey to send 1,000 tons of aid to Rohingya
Turkey to send 1,000 tons of aid to Rohingya
Mystery of CIA’s lost nuclear device haunts Himalayan villagers 60 years on
- Plutonium-fueled spy system was meant to monitor China’s nuclear activity after 1964 atomic tests
- Porter who took part in Nanda Devi mission warned family of ‘danger buried in snow’
NEW DELHI: Porters who helped American intelligence officers carry a nuclear spy system up the precarious slopes of Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, returned home with stories that sent shockwaves through nearby villages, leaving many in fear that still holds six decades later.
A CIA team, working with India’s Intelligence Bureau, planned to install the device in the remote part of the Himalayas to monitor China, but a blizzard forced them to abandon the system before reaching the summit.
When they returned, the device was gone.
The spy system contained a large quantity of highly radioactive plutonium-238 — roughly a third of the amount used in the atomic bomb dropped by the US on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in the closing stages of the Second World War.
“The workers and porters who went with the CIA team in 1965 would tell the story of the nuclear device, and the villagers have been living in fear ever since,” said Narendra Rana from the Lata village near Nanda Devi’s peak.
His father, Dhan Singh Rana, was one of the porters who carried the device during the CIA’s mission in 1965.
“He told me there was a danger buried in the snow,” Rana said. “The villagers fear that as long as the device is buried in the snow, they are safe, but if it bursts, it will contaminate the air and water, and no one will be safe after that.”
During the Sino-Indian tensions in the 1960s, India cooperated with the US in surveillance after China conducted its first nuclear tests in 1964. The Nanda Devi mission was part of this cooperation and was classified for years. It only came under public scrutiny in 1978, when the story was broken by Outsider magazine.
The article caused an uproar in India, with lawmakers demanding the location of the nuclear device be revealed and calling for political accountability. The same year, then Prime Minister Morarji Desai set up a committee to assess whether nuclear material in the area near Nanda Devi could pollute the Ganges River, which originates there.
The Ganges is one of the world’s most crucial freshwater sources, with about 655 million people in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh depending on it for their essential needs.
The committee, chaired by prominent scientists, submitted its report a few months later, dismissing any cause for concerns, and establishing that even in the worst-case scenario of the device’s rupture, the river’s water would not be contaminated.
But for the villagers, the fear that the shell containing radioactive plutonium could break apart never goes away, and peace may only come once it is found.
Many believe the device, trapped within the glacier’s shifting ice, may have moved downhill over time.
Rana’s father told him that the device felt hot when it was carried, and he believed it might have melted its way into the glacier, remaining buried deep inside.
An imposing mass of rock and ice, Nanda Devi at 7,816 m is the second-highest mountain in India after Kangchenjunga.
When a glacier near the mountain burst in 2021, claiming over 200 lives, scientists explained that the disaster was due to global warming, but in nearby villages the incident was initially blamed on a nuclear explosion.
“They feared the device had burst. Those rescuing people were afraid they might die from radiation,” Rana said. “If any noise is heard, if any smoke appears in the sky, we start fearing a leak from the nuclear device.”
The latent fear surfaces whenever natural disasters strike or media coverage puts the missing device back in the spotlight. Most recently, a New York Times article on the CIA mission’s 60th anniversary reignited the unease.
“The apprehensions are genuine. After 1965, Americans came twice to search for the device. The villagers accompanied them, but it could not be found, which remains a concern for the local community,” said Atul Soti, an environmentalist in Joshimath, Uttarakhand, about 50 km from Nanda Devi.
“People are worried. They have repeatedly sought answers from the government, but no clear response has been provided so far. Periodically, the villagers voice their concerns, and they need a definitive government statement on this issue.”
Despite repeated queries whenever media attention arises, Indian officials have not released detailed updates since the Desai-appointed committee submitted its findings.
“The government should issue a white paper to address people’s concerns. The white paper will make it clear about the status of the device, and whether leakage from the device could pollute the Ganges River,” Soti told Arab News.
“The government should be clear. If the government is not reacting, then it further reinforces the fear.”
