The head of the Red Cross on Sunday said it was not safe to return Rohingya refugees to their homes in Myanmar, where he described whole villages abandoned and destroyed. Peter Maurer toured strife-torn western Myanmar before visiting refugee camps over the border in neighbouring Bangladesh, where nearly one million Rohingya have sought refuge from violence.
The bulk of the persecuted Muslims in Bangladesh have arrived since August, fleeing a huge Myanmar army crackdown in troubled Rakhine state that the UN has likened to ethnic cleansing. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday will make his first visit to the camps since that influx of nearly 700,000 Rohingya sparked a humanitarian crisis in southeast Bangladesh.
The UN says Guterres, who discussed the Rohingya with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka on Sunday, will use the trip to study prospects for "a safe, voluntary and dignified return" of refugees to Myanmar. But relief agencies warn that conditions in Rakhine, which is heavily restricted to international observers, remain too unsafe to consider repatriating the Rohingya to Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said a lot more was needed to improve the situation he witnessed in Rakhine during an official visit the past few days.
"What I've seen in terms of destruction of villages, abandonment of situations, disruptions in markets, of livelihood, of communities, I don't think the present moment is an ideal condition to return," Maurer told AFP in an interview in Chakmarkul refugee camp. He said more was needed for those families eking out survival in gigantic tent cities in Bangladesh, where many would rather endure hardship than return to persecution.