DHAKA: It is not yet safe for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims living in refugee camps in Bangladesh to begin returning to Myanmar, a senior United Nations official said Thursday.
While many Rohingya want to eventually return to their villages, UNICEF deputy executive director Justin Forsyth said that no one he met during visits to Bangladesh’s refugee camps said they would go back now.
“This moment is not safe to go back,” he said. “We have to improve the security situation inside Myanmar to send them back.”
More than 680,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state beginning in August, after Myanmar security forces began “clearance operations” in their villages in the wake of attacks by Rohingya insurgents on police posts. While most of the refugees left Myanmar in the first weeks of the crisis, Rohingya are continuing to trickle across the border into Bangladesh, complaining of mistreatment at home.
Forsyth spoke one day after former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson resigned suddenly from an advisory panel on the crisis, calling it a “whitewash and a cheerleading operation” for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
“She blames all the problems that Myanmar is having on the international media, on the UN, on human rights groups, on other governments, and I think this is caused by the bubble that is around her, by individuals that are not giving her frank advice,” Richardson, once a close friend of Suu Kyi, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.
Richardson said Suu Kyi appeared to want the 10-member international advisory group, one in a string of Rohingya commissions set up by the Myanmar government, to endorse her policies.
“I’m not going to be part of it because I think there are serious issues of human rights violations, safety, citizenship, peace and stability that need to be addressed,” said Richardson, who often works as an international troubleshooter. “I just felt that my advice and counsel would not be heeded.”
Forsyth said he didn’t know the details of the resignation but that “I understand his frustration.”
Gradual repatriations of Rohingya were to begin Tuesday under agreements signed by Myanmar and Bangladesh, but Bangladeshi officials delayed the returns at the last minute, saying more time was needed amid questions about safety and whether the refugees were returning voluntarily.
Forsyth urged Myanmar authorities to allow international organizations access to all the areas affected by the crisis.
UN official says not safe yet for Rohingya return to Myanmar
UN official says not safe yet for Rohingya return to Myanmar
More than 9,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across much of US
- “Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X
DALLAS: More than 9,000 flights across the US set to take off over the weekend have been canceled as a major storm expected to wreak havoc across much of the country threatens to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways.
Roughly 140 million people were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England.
The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.
Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight were moving toward the central part of the state on Saturday, the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said.
“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X.
Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 24 Celsius.
About 68,000 power outages were reported across the country at 8 a.m. ET, about 27,600 of them in Texas. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.
After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted.
Temperatures reached minus 34 C just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.
