Erdoğan: Turkey aims to build more livable camps for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan addressed the ongoing Rohingya crisis in his speech at Istanbul Atatürk Airport on Friday, before his visit to Kazakhstan.

“We are engaging in multilateral diplomacy for Rakhine. Regarding this issue, we’ve had phone conversations with more than 20 leaders. Moreover, my wife, son, our Foreign Minister and Family and Social Policies Minister visited Bangladesh. Thank God, we have begun yielding results in some matters, even though it is a slow process.

If the Bangladesh government allocates an area for us, we aim to establish more secure and livable camps there.”

An estimated 270,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar in the past two weeks and sought refuge in Bangladesh, where two existing refugee camps are "bursting at the seams", the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.

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.