YANGON (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed "shock" at comments by Myanmar's military chief in which he said the Rohingya minority shared nothing in common with the rest of the population and that their demand for citizenship had stoked recent violence.
Nearly 700,000 Muslim Rohingya fled to Bangladesh since the military launched a crackdown in Myanmar's western Rakhine state in response to insurgent attacks on security forces in August, according to U.N. estimates. The United States and U.N. have described the operation as ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, which Myanmar denies.