UN Envoy on Myanmar Tells General Assembly: Over 16 Million Need Aid, 4 Million Displaced, No Conditions for Safe Returns
Julie Bishop, Special Envoy of the Secretary-General on Myanmar, told an interactive dialogue of the UN General Assembly's Third Committee in New York on October 28 that narratives on the crisis differ profoundly and facts are deeply contested, but the scale of suffering speaks for itself: the United Nations estimates that more than 16 million people in Myanmar require humanitarian assistance and over 4 million are internally displaced.
Bishop said the resistance maintains that the military has killed at least 8,500 civilians since February 2021 and that more than 20,000 people remain arbitrarily detained, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. After international calls, including her personal plea for verified proof of life, the authorities in Nay Pyi Taw recently granted the ICRC access to Aung San Suu Kyi and allowed contact with her son. Bangladesh says it now hosts more than 1.3 million Rohingya from Myanmar, and Bishop said she made her second visit to the camps in Cox's Bazar last week, where the human suffering is acute, while those who remain in Rakhine face armed conflict, landmines, movement restrictions, forced recruitment and severely constrained access to services.
'Conditions for safe, voluntary, dignified and sustainable return do not exist,' Bishop said, warning that returns without guarantees of safety risk violating international protection obligations. She said the UN continues to support ASEAN's Five-Point Consensus but believes it requires greater elaboration and benchmarks, and challenged what she called the myth that the conflict can be resolved militarily.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 联合国总部大楼，位于美国纽约。Jakub Hałun 摄，CC BY 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / The United Nations headquarters in New York City, United States. Photo by Jakub Hałun, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
