Officials agree to end flow of Rohingya

NAYPYITAW, Myanmar — Government officials from Bangladesh and Myanmar agreed Tuesday to halt the outflow of Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh and enable the refugees to return home.

The two sides met in Myanmar’s capital, Naypyitaw, to discuss a crisis that has seen hundreds of thousands of Rohingya flee to Bangladesh over the past two months to escape violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

“Myanmar affirms its commitment to immediately halt the outflow of Myanmar residents to Bangladesh, to restore normalcy in Rakhine to enable displaced Myanmar residents to return from Bangladesh at the earliest” possible time, the sides said in a joint statement.

More than 600,000 Rohingya from northern Rakhine have fled to Bangladesh since Aug. 25, when Myanmar security forces began a scorched-earth campaign against Rohingya villages. Myanmar’s government has said it was responding to attacks on police outposts by insurgents from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, but the UN and others have said the response was disproportionate.

Tuesday’s joint statement said that Myanmar declared ARSA “a terrorist organization” after Aug. 25 and asked Bangladesh to hand over any suspects who may have fled there. Bangladesh said it would “continue to co-operate with Myanmar against insurgents, militants and terrorists.”

Earlier this month, the two sides agreed to set up a working group on the repatriation process.

Myanmar’s Buddhist majority denies that Rohingya Muslims are a separate ethnic group and regards them as having migrated illegally from Bangladesh, although many families have lived in Myanmar for generations.

The exodus of the Rohingya has become a major humanitarian crisis and sparked international condemnation of Buddhist-majority Myanmar. The Associated Press

TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/GETTY IMAGES Rohingya refugees rest after crossing into Bangladesh from Myanmar at a refugee camp in Bangladesh on Tuesday. The governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed to stop Rohingya from going to Bangladesh, and to return refugees who fled violence in...

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