The United Nations on Tuesday said that it would appeal for a sum of $430 million in aid from the international community to assist the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
Rohingyas are stateless Indo-Aryan people from Rakhine state, Myanmar and are categorised as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Around 40,000 Rohingyas have settled in India. Ever since the latest flare-up of violence against the community in Myanmar this year, over 4 lakh Rohingyas have fled the state, pouring into nearby countries like Bangladesh seeking refuge.
Bangladesh is currently facing a refugee crisis, where the figure of Rohingya refugees has more than doubled than what was calculated weeks earlier when their sudden exodus from Rakhine began late August.
The latest string of violence in Myanmar's northwestern Rakhine state began on August 25 when Rohingya insurgents reportedly attacked various police posts and an army base. A military counter-offensive and clashes led to a loss of at least 400 lives and initiated an exodus of the villagers in the region to Bangladesh.
The UN head of humanitarian affairs, Mark Lowcock, said that the conditions in Rohingya camps in Bangladesh were terrible and that the UN would appeal on October 23 in Geneva for funds to assist the refugees.The statement came from the UN six weeks after it started relief operations in the region.
"We are imminently going to be publishing an update to the UN response plan and will be looking, in order to support the government of Bangladesh and Bangladesh's own institutions, to raise from international community something like &430 million to enable us to scale up the relief operation," Lowcock said in a press conference in the Cox's Bazar district, Efe reports.
"We have a fantastic set of proposals that come from all the response agencies and we are in a stage now where the main constraint we face is finance for those essential programs," Lowcock added.
The UN states that more than half a million Rohingyas have arrived in Bangladesh since August 25. According to the UNICEF figures, more than 60 percent of the refugees are children.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres last week had condemned the humanitarian "nightmare" faced by the Rohingya community and had urged the Myanmar government to cease anti-Rohingya military operations.
The UN chief, while speaking to the UN Security Council (UNSC), had also demanded Aung San Suu Kyi-led nation to open humanitarian access to its Rakhine region which is wracked with conflict and bloodshed.
"The situation has spiralled into the world's fastest developing refugee emergency, a humanitarian and human rights nightmare," Guterres said.
