DHAKA: Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan on Monday visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar and urged the international community to stand up to the injustices inflicted on the community.
Jordan’s queen visited the Kutupalang Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar’s Ukhiya Upazila and spoke of the “shocking escalation of violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar.”
“Although justice of law has been established globally, Myanmar is not accepting that,” she added.
“The international community should stand beside the Rohingya people, not only for humanitarian reasons, but for justice,” Queen Rania said, bdnews24 reported.
More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled across the border into Bangladesh since the Myanmar military began a crackdown in Rakhine state on August 25.
She called upon the world to speak out against the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Rohingyas. “One has to ask, why is the plight of this Muslim minority group being ignored? Why has this systematic persecution been allowed to play out for so long?” she added.
She was accompanied by Bangladesh’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam.
She also hailed Bangladeshi people for showing enormous generosity and giving shelter to thousands of Rohingyas.
Queen Rania during her visit to the Kutupalong Rohingya camp sat with Rohingya children, talked to the people there and listened to their plight. She is a board member of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and an advocate of the work of UN humanitarian agencies.
Describing their stories of “unimaginable acts of violence”, Queen Rania mentioned Rohingyas’ accounts of children orphaned, women brutalized, family members butchered, and villages burned.
“Before coming here, I had braced myself to witness some desperate conditions, but the stories I heard today were heartbreaking and harrowing,” she said.
“I’ve heard of systematic rape of young girls, who were trapped in schools and raped by soldiers. I’ve heard of babies being kicked around like footballs and stomped on. I’ve heard family members telling me how they’ve seen their own parents killed, right before their eyes,” she recalled.
“This is something that is unacceptable,” Queen Rania said.
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The Queen said it is unforgivable that this crisis is unfolding on the world stage to a largely indifferent audience. “The world seems to be silent to what many are acknowledging now as an ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims.”
The Queen is also the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) first Eminent Advocate for Children. She also stated that 95 per cent of Muslim Rohingyas do not have access to safe water and more than three quarters lack food.
With agencies inputs