Eighty years after its founding, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) convenes at a moment of geopolitical hostility not seen since the Cold War. The clash between democratic and autocratic powers has paralyzed the UN’s highest bodies, adding to the intractability of conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine.
With the Security Council deadlocked, the responsibility to uphold the UN Charter has largely shifted to committed middle powers.
In keeping with this shift, on September 30, 2025, General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock will convene member states to address another stalemate, the Rohingya crisis; a catastrophe politicized regionally at the expense of more than one million refugees in Cox’s Bazaar, in Chattogram, Bangladesh.
Myanmar spiralled into a brutal civil war following the military coup of February 2021 that pre-empted the swearing-in of elected civilian leaders, including President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, who remain in detention.
The takeover by the Tatmadaw junta sparked mass protests, a violent crackdown, a nationwide armed resistance movement, and a humanitarian crisis unleashed by the ethnic cleansing and displacement of the long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority.
Today, Myanmar remains caught in a war of attrition produced by China’s role as a regional power. Beijing’s bet-hedging engagement with all sides—the junta, the democratic opposition, and ethnic armies—has frozen the conflict in a devastating deadlock that serves its own strategic interests. This stalemate, fueled by shipments of Russian and Chinese arms, allows the junta to keep fighting despite losing territory. The result is a vortex of violence paid for by innocent civilians, including the Rohingya refugees.
The junta has announced elections for December 28th, a development greeted with widespread scepticism. Meanwhile, the diplomatic track remains stalled. The primary regional mechanism, from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has proven ineffective. Into this void steps the UN, providing the critical backdrop for what could be a legacy-defining moment, including for Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the microcredit pioneer who, after years of persecution by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, became the country’s chief adviser, or interim leader, on her ouster last year.
On August 12th, the UN-mandated Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar released its annual report, detailing systematic torture in Myanmar detention facilities. This latest catalogue of human rights abuses — including sexual violence and mutilation — adds a new layer of state-sponsored depravity to a record of abuses that includes, among other human rights violations, the brutally ironic forced conscription of Rohingya refugees in exchange for the citizenship they were stripped of by the 1982 Citizenship Law.
The world doesn’t need another plea for help; it needs a witness. Mr. Yunus’s own experience has given him an intimate understanding of what it means to be targeted by an unjust regime.
More than a year into the military’s conscription drive, it has become clear that forcing people to fight for the same regime oppressing them has only underscored the Tatmadaw’s disdain for winning hearts and minds, choosing instead to add to its list of war crimes by using young men, including Rohingya refugees, as cannon fodder. The push has only added to the exodus from the country, while gaining little territory for the Tatmadaw, which holds only 21% of Myanmar.
In a 2021 Atlantic Council piece, researcher Imrul Islam, described the life of a Rohingya refugee as being “suspended in a web of apathy, injustice, and bureaucracy,” an “ecosystem of hurt, coping, and suffering” where youth are left on the margins of humanitarian programming. Since then, field reports from numerous humanitarian organizations are unequivocal: catastrophic cuts in international aid are pushing the Cox’s Bazaar camps into a state of collapse. By mid-2025, the UN’s Joint Response Plan for the crisis was critically underfunded. Food rations have been repeatedly slashed, and child malnutrition has surged past emergency thresholds.
As a result, a contagion of despair is taking hold, with aid groups warning of a surge in human trafficking and gender-based violence as families are forced into impossible choices to survive. Meanwhile, the lack of educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of children risks creating a lost generation. It brings to mind the simple, devastating message a Rohingya elder gave to Bob Rae when he was Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar, and which became the title of his report on the crisis: “Tell them we’re human”.
This collapse is a direct result of a failure of international diplomacy at a time when the clash of world orders is influencing both outcomes and their elusiveness, but it is also a reaction to a changing reality on the ground. The junta’s cruelty is a function of its desperation. As Robin Sears wrote in Policy in 2024, the military badly miscalculated the resilience of the opposition, which has since galvanized into a multi-ethnic National Unity Government (NUG) whose forces now control nearly half the country. Facing unprecedented losses, the Tatmadaw resorted to its conscription drive last year as a last-ditch effort to terrorize the population and throw bodies at the front line.
This is why the fight for legal accountability has become more critical than ever. Organizations like Justice For All are pursuing the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, while Humunus (formerly Victim Advocates International) supports the investigation at the International Criminal Court. Their efforts, supported by groups like Independent Diplomat who fight to ensure Rohingya voices are heard in forums such as the UN, represent the last, best hope for justice.
As Muhammad Yunus prepares to address the 80th UNGA, likely for the last time as head of Bangladesh’s government, he holds a unique position of moral authority.
The world will listen, but what it needs to hear is not another carefully worded diplomatic appeal. Yunus will be tempted to speak the familiar language of the UNGA rostrum—to call for burden-sharing, increased humanitarian aid, and a renewed push for repatriation of refugees.
He will be advised to be statesmanlike, to build consensus, to not alienate potential partners. But to do so would be to ignore the horrific new reality on the ground and to squander a historic opportunity.
The greatest service Yunus could perform for the Rohingya people, and for the moral standing of the international community, would be to use his platform not to plead, but to account for. To channel the raw warnings of the stakeholders on the ground and the cold, hard evidence of the lawyers in The Hague and of UN investigators. To identify clearly the causes and responsible parties to the catastrophe because otherwise, a solution will remain elusive.
The world doesn’t need another plea for help; it needs a witness. Mr. Yunus’s own experience has given him an intimate understanding of what it means to be targeted by an unjust regime. He can now lend his voice to those who have none. The question before him at the UN is simple: will he speak as a statesman, or as a survivor?
Policy Columnist Anil Wasif is a public servant in the Ontario government. He serves on the University of Toronto’s Governing Council and the Advisory Board of McGill’s Max Bell School. Internationally, he serves on the OECD’s Infrastructure Delivery Committee and the World Bank Economic Development Institute’s Community of Practice. He co-owns and manages the Canada-born global non-profit BacharLorai. The views expressed are his own.
