Emine Erdoğan, accompanied by top Turkish officials, arrived in Bangladesh to establish contact with the Rohingya and complete the preparations for Turkey’s following aid shipments
Turkey's First Lady and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's wife Emine Erdogan and the accompanying delegation traveled to Bangladesh to distribute aid to the Rohingya ensnared in Myanmar’s violence reports, www.yenisafak.com
According to presidential sources, the delegation departed from Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport. The shipment was overseen by the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA).
The 1,000 tons of emergency aid packages containing rice, dried fish and clothing were delivered to the Social Services Ministry in Rakhine State at a handover ceremony, according to a statement issued by TIKA.Officials in the delegation included Emine Erdoğan, her son Bilal Erdoğan, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, TİKA President Serdar Çam, Disaster and Management Agency (AFAD) President Mehmet Güllüoğlu, Turkish Red Cross General Manager İbrahim Altan, TÜRGEV President Arzu Akalın, KADEM President Sare Aydın, Family and Social Policy Minister Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya and Justice and Development (AK) Party Deputy Chairman for Human Rights and Istanbul Deputy Ravza Kavakcı Kan.
Emine Erdoğan and the accompanying delegation will visit the refugee camps of Rohingya in Bangladesh, and will be informed of the incidents taking place across the region directly from the region. The delegation entered Cox’s Bazar, located near the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.
They will complete preliminary preparations for the following shipment of humanitarian aid. Turkey will provide 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to Myanmar’s Rohingya in the second stage of support.The aid will be distributed to conflict areas via military helicopters in coordination with the Rakhine State government as uncertainty and security concerns continue in the region.
The move makes TIKA the first foreign aid agency to be granted permission from the Myanmar government to enter the region since the violence escalated on Aug. 25. About 146,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from what the UN is calling an “ethnic cleansing” in Myanmar. The Myanmar administration has not allowed foreign organizations to enter the region, thus the death count is indeterminable.
Rakhine, situated in Myanmar’s west, has long been plagued by violence. In a crackdown last October, the UN documented mass gang rapes, killings – including infants and young children – brutal beatings and disappearances that constituted evidence of human rights violations by security forces that indicated crimes against humanity.
