The United Nations (UN) has urged Myanmar to implement the recommendations of a panel on the Rohingya crisis that was led by a former UN head, the late Kofi Annan, including ensuring freedom of movement and access to education for children from the persecuted Muslim minority.
The United Nations (UN) has urged Myanmar to implement the recommendations of a panel on the Rohingya crisis that was led by a former UN head, the late Kofi Annan, including ensuring freedom of movement and access to education for children from the persecuted Muslim minority.
Speaking at a forum in the Myanmarese capital, Naypyidaw, on Monday, the head of the UN’s Children’s Fund, UNICEF, Henrietta Fore, gave a bleak assessment of the outlook for Rohingya children in Myanmar and the larger number of them who have fled with their families to neighboring Bangladesh.
Fore said the refugees, who have fled state-sponsored violence in Myanmar, faced risks and those still in Myanmar lacked access to proper education.
She said the Rohingya children were living “a precarious and an almost hopeless existence” in camps in neighboring Bangladesh. Myanmar, she said, was yet to create the right conditions for the return of the refugees from Bangladesh.
In August last year, UNICEF said thousands of Rohingya Muslim children lacked proper education both in Myanmar and in the border camps in Bangladesh, warning that the Myanmarese kids could become “a lost generation.”
