THE United Nations security council has agreed its first resolution on Myanmar in 74 years.

The resolution passed on Wednesday demands an end to the violence that has engulfed the country and calls on its military rulers to release all political prisoners, including ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi. 

The military seized power in February 2021 after deposing Ms Suu Kyi’s government and arresting her and other leading officials.

Since then they have brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protests, leaving several thousand dead and more than 16,000 jailed.

China, Russia and India abstained from the UN vote, paving the way for the remaining 12 members of the security council to approve the resolution.

China’s UN ambassador, Zhang Jun, told the council “there is no quick fix to the issue.

“Whether or not it can be properly resolved in the end, depends fundamentally, and only, on Myanmar itself.”

Russia’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Moscow did not view the situation as a threat to international security and therefore believed it should not be dealt with by the security council.

Last month the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a rights monitoring organisation, said they believed more than 16,000 people had been arrested on political charges since the military coup.

They also said that more than 13,000 were still in detention while at least 2,465 civilians had been killed in the same period.

This comes as the regime has reportedly arrested 12 people accused of illegally transporting members of the Muslim Rohingya minority across the country for travel to Malaysia.

This included 13 who are reported to have died from suffocation while being hidden in a fuel tanker truck.

The state-run Mirror Daily newspaper reported on Wednesday that the alleged members of a human trafficking gang were accused of arranging to smuggle 255 Rohingya from refugee camps in south-east Bangladesh to Malaysia.

The reports said security forces arrested the accused traffickers on December 9 and 16 and seized six vehicles, including a fuel tanker used in the trafficking operation. 

Thirty-one Rohingya waiting to continue on their way to Malaysia were also arrested in the past two weeks, the report said.

More than 700,000 Rohingya, concentrated in the western state of Rakhine, fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after a brutal 2017 counter-insurgency campaign conducted by the government in response to attacks by a Rohingya insurgent group.