Myanmar minister to visit Rohingya camps in Bangladesh

DHAKA: A Myanmar minister will tour camps for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, an official said, the first such visit since Myanmar’s army drove nearly 700,000 members of the Muslim minority across the border.

Bangladesh’s foreign ministry confirmed yesterday that Myanmar’s social welfare, relief and resettlement minister Win Myat Aye would visit the congested camps, which are home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees.

“His programme has not been fixed yet,” Tareque Muhammad, a director-general at the foreign ministry, said.

The visit is slated for April 11 or 12.

US and UN officials say the military crackdown, which began last August in the mainly Buddhist nation, purportedly to flush out guerillas, amounted to ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

Another Bangladeshi official said it would be the first visit by a Myanmar minister to the camps, which have sheltered Rohingya refugees since the early 1990s, for more than a decade.

Myat Aye is the deputy head of a task force led by Aung San Suu Kyi on the crisis in Rakhine State, and a top official overseeing a stalled agreement with Bangladesh to repatriate some 750,000 refugees.

Myanmar has approved several hundred Rohingya from a list of thousands to return to their homeland, but not a single one has crossed back yet. — AFP