"The flight of Myanmar's Rohingya to Bangladesh should have come as no surprise to the United Nations.
For more than three years, a chorus of voices from within the U.N. community have warned that the country's minority Muslims faced a grim reckoning that the U.N. was ill prepared to handle and called for pressing the government of Myanmar, which is often referred to as Burma, to halt its abuses...
But at every step of the way these critics have faced fierce resistance from some of the most senior U.N. officials, who feared that publicly shaming Myanmar's rulers would complicate efforts to steer the country through a delicate political transition from military rule to democracy and jeopardize the U.N.'s development and humanitarian relief efforts in the country...
The refugee crisis has its roots in a long history of Burmese discrimination against the Rohingya. But some of the U.N.'s shortcomings in responding to the crisis are self-made: a product of long-standing interagency squabbles over turf and policy, compounded by a bureaucratic decision taken in December 1977 that empowered the U.N. Development Program to appoint the senior U.N. official, or resident coordinator, presiding over most of the international body's duty stations around the world.
As an agency that relies on governments' cooperation to do its work, UNDP has historically shied away from tackling thorny political matters or confronting those governments when they commit abuses, according to the critics. That, they claimed, fed a culture of silence that has pervaded many duty stations, subjecting the U.N. to allegations that it has been complicit in atrocities, from Myanmar to Sri Lanka...
In April, a consultant hired by the U.N. office in Yangon warned in an internal report that it was only a matter of time before a new wave of violence occurred. 'All indications,' the consultant, Richard Horsey, wrote in his confidential report, are that Muslim insurgents would launch an attack on Myanmar security forces in the next six months, triggering a 'heavy-handed and indiscriminate' army assault on the region's long-discriminated-against Rohingya Muslims.
The report, which was obtained by Foreign Policy, was first reported on by the Guardian, which said its distribution within the U.N. was suppressed by [U.N.'s resident coordinator, Renata] Lok-Dessallien..."