Mideast War Risks Dramatically Deepening Myanmar Crisis: UN Expert

GENEVA—Myanmar’s spiraling rights and humanitarian crises risk getting “much worse” as global attention focuses on the Middle East war and aid dwindles further, the top United Nations expert on the Asian country warned.

More than five years after Myanmar’s military snatched power in a coup, the junta is relentlessly continuing to attack civilians and obstruct desperately needed humanitarian aid, Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on rights in Myanmar, told AFP in an interview this week.

Andrews, whose mandate ends next month, cautioned that the war in the Middle East risked dramatically deepening the Myanmar crisis, and obscuring it even more from international view.