B’desh drops plan to send Rohingya back to Myanmar
Officials say they failed to find anyone willing to go back home
The head of Bangladesh’s refugee commission said plans to begin the repatriation of 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar on Thursday were scrapped after officials were unable to find anyone who wanted to return.
“The refugees are not willing to go back now,” Refugee Commissioner Abul Kalam told The Associated Press. He said officials “can’t force them to go” but will continue to try to “motivate them so it happens.”
Some people on the government’s repatriation list disappeared into the sprawling refugee camps to avoid being sent home, while others joined a large demonstration against the plan.
More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh from western Myanmar’s Rakhine state to escape killings and destruction of their villages by the military and Buddhist vigilantes that have drawn widespread condemnation of Myanmar.
The UN, whose human rights officials had urged Bangladesh to halt the repatriation process even as its refugee agency workers helped to facilitate it, welcomed Thursday’s development.
Firas al-Khateeb, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Cox’s Bazar, said it was unclear when the process might begin again. “We want their repatriation, but it has to be voluntary, safe and smooth,” he said.
Bangladesh officials declined to say whether another attempt at repatriation would be made on Friday.
Bangladesh foreign minister AH Mahmood Ali told reporters in Dhaka late on Thursday that “there is no question of forcible repatriation. We gave them shelter, so why should we send them back forcibly?”
At the Unchiprang refugee camp, a Bangladeshi refugee official implored the Rohingya on Thursday to return to their country over a loudspeaker.
“We have arranged everything for you, we have six buses here, we have trucks, we have food. We want to offer everything to you. If you agree to go, we’ll take you to the border, to the transit camp,” he said.
“We won’t go,” hundreds of voices, including children’s, chanted in reply.
Some refugees on the repatriation lists — which authorities say were drawn up with assistance from the UNHCR — said they don’t want to go back.
At the Jamtoli refugee camp, one of the sprawling refugee settlements near the city of Cox’s Bazar, 25-year-old Setara said she and her two children, age 4 and 7, were on a repatriation list, but her parents were not. She said she had never asked to return to Myanmar, and that she had sent her children to a school run by aid workers Thursday morning as usual.
“They killed my husband; now I live here with my parents,” said Setara, who refused to divulge her full name. “I don’t want to go back.”
She said that other refugees on the repatriation list had fled to other camps, hoping to disappear amid the crowded lanes of refugees, aid workers and Bangladeshi soldiers, which on Thursday were bustling with commerce and other activity.