RAKHINE – A group of international journalists and activists has called on the UN to put an end to what they dsecribed as “Muslim holocaust” in Burma, accusing the Buddhist-majority country of committing the “worst bloodshed” against the Rohingya Muslim minority group.

“Hereby, we, as the international journalists, photographers and media activists condemn in the strongest terms the Muslims’ holocaust in Myanmar [Burma], and call for an emergency meeting of the UN Human Rights Council on this issue, before the world faces the worst bloodshed after the WWII,” the journalists said in an open letter to the UN Human Rights Council cited by Press TV on Saturday, September 23.

The letter expressed deep concern over the murder and displacement of thousands of Muslims in Burma who are deprived of their citizenship rights and forced out of their homes while their farms and cottages are burnt.

The journalists warned that while the international community, including the US and EU, have imposed an arms embargo against the government in Burma, Israel is “the main arms supplier of Myanmar –[Burma] and continues to arm Burma military amid ongoing violence against Rohingya Muslims.”

“It is noteworthy that all these crimes are happening before the Myanmar’s [Burma] Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi, who not only refrains from condemning these crimes against humanity but also claimed that the situation is being twisted by a ‘huge iceberg of misinformation’,” the letter pointed out.

Nearly 430,000 members of the Rohingya Muslim minority have fled from western Rakhine state to Bangladesh to escape a military offensive that the United Nations has branded a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

More than 1,000 people may already have been killed in Burma, mostly minority Rohingya Muslims, a senior United Nations representative told AFP earlier this month.

According to Human Right Watch, new satellite images show that 99 percent of the villages in Rakhine have been destroyed.

On Friday, Amnesty International said Burma’s military and vigilante Buddhist mobs continue to set fire to Rohingya Muslim villages in Rakhine, despite the claims by Suu Kyi that army operations have ended there.

The government forces in Burma do not even spare the fleeing Rohingya refugees.

Recent reports by Amnesty International and Bangladeshi officials say the military plants landmines on the path of those trying to cross into Bangladesh, causing them to sustain serious wounds or lose their limbs.