The Australian Christian Lobby has welcomed an Australian Government decision to contribute an additional $10 million towards helping to address the Rohingya refugee crisis unfolding on the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh but said it also needed to step up diplomatic pressure to resolve the situation.
It’s estimated that more than 600,000 refugees have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar’s Rakhine state since last August in what UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein, has said seemed like a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
In September, Australia announced it was contributing $20 million to help Rohingya Muslims caught up in the crisis with the additional $10 million announced this week taking the total to $30 million.
Lyle Shelton, managing director of the ACL, said while Australia and other nations were “slow to act as this tragedy developed”, news of the additional funding was “very welcome”.
He said the ACL called on Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to “condemn the Myanmar Government for its role in the violence against the Rohingya people and step up measures to end military and economic ties between Australia and the Suu Kyi Government until the issue has been resolved”.
Ms Bishop said this week that the Australian Government condemned the ongoing violence in Rakhine state and continued to call for the protection of civilians and “unfettered access” for humanitarian workers.
The US State Department announced this week that it was withdrawing military assistance from those military officers and units in Myanmar which have been involved in violence against the Rohingya.
UNICEF said last week that more than 320,000 Rohingya children were now in Bangladesh, with executive director Anthony Lake saying that while the crisis was “stealing their childhoods”, “[w]e must not let it steal their futures at the same time”.
