Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday: ‘‘It is important for the Myanmar authorities to take necessary steps to address the legitimate grievances of minority communities, including the citizenship demands of the Muslim/Rohingya.’’
Mr.Ban also said that if Myanmar government could not do so, reforms and process of Myanmar’s political and economic situations would not be gained as they hoped.
Ban spoke at a meeting of ambassadors from the ‘‘Group of Friends on Myanmar,’’ consisting of Australia, China, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Britain, the United States, Vietnam, and the country holding the presidency of the European Union, currently Lithuania. Myanmar UN mission did not attend it.
‘‘It is not enough to just have elections, you have to end the killings and persecutions,’’ Saudi Arabian U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Yahya al-Mouallemi said at that occasion.
Myanmar already has a citizenship law since 1982, recognizing eight races and 130 minority groups not including Rohingyas of about 8000,000 in Myanmar. Many Myanmar Buddhists view the Rohingyas as interlopers brought in by the British colonialists when the nation was known as Burma.
Earlier this year, Myanmar passed a law limiting Rohingyas in two townships in the western state of Rakhine, bordering Bangladesh, to having two children, a law that does not apply to Buddhists. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi criticized the law, and was widely denounced by Buddhists in Myanmar. Seen as likely to be elected president of Myanmar, she has had little else to say about Rohingya rights.
So-called Dangerous Polarization between Buddhists and Muslims
