DHAKA: Malaysia and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will send a peace mission to Myanmar to help address the Rohingya crisis, officials said Tuesday, as Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus, whose country hosts most refugees, met with Malaysian leaders.
The Rohingya, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, lived for centuries in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state but were stripped of their citizenship in the 1980s.
Since then, many of them have fled to Bangladesh, with around 700,000 arriving in 2017 after a military crackdown that the UN has been referring to as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing by Myanmar.
Today, more than 1.3 million Rohingya are cramped inside 33 camps in Cox’s Bazar district on the southeast coast of Bangladesh, making it the world’s largest refugee settlement.
Yunus, the Nobel Peace Laureate who pledged support for the Rohingya upon taking office last year, is on a three-day visit to Malaysia — the ASEAN chair for 2025 — at the invitation of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.
