WILL THE ROHINGYA EVER REACH HOME?
As repatriation talks between Myanmar and Bangladesh continue, it remains unclear how and when the persecuted group will return
Asenior Cabinet minister and army general from Myanmar arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Thursday to discuss a trouble-plagued scheme to repatriate Rohingya Muslims who fled military assaults and now are in camps in Bangladesh.
In less than half a year, around 700,000 Rohingya escaped attacks in their home state, Rakhine, and what the international community has called ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s security forces.
The Myanmar government insists it is committed to the repatriation of those Rohingya who can prove they recently left Rakhine. The Bangladeshi side says the same.
But few expect that the two days of meetings between Lt Gen Kyaw Swe, Myanmar’s home minister, and his Bangladeshi counterpart, Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, will elicit much action. Over months of sporadic talks, each side has blamed the other for failing to put in place a voluntary repatriation agreement signed in November.
What neither side is fully talking about is what the Rohingya Muslims, who do not have a formal representative in the talks, want to happen.
Do the Rohingya want to return?
A long-persecuted Muslim minority, the Rohingya began fleeing in huge numbers last August when attacks on security posts by Rohingya insurgents unleashed a brutal military response. Hundreds of Rohingya villages were burned to the ground by security forces and associated mobs of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.
At least 6,700 Rohingya met violent deaths in Rakhine in the month after the military’s scorched-earth campaign, according t o Medicins Sans Frontieres. Rohingya women physically traumatised by rape continue to cross the border into Bangladesh.
Myanmar’s civilian administration, however, refuses to admit to any systematic wrongdoing by the nation’s military. Independent journalists and human rights investigators have not been allowed access to the epicentre of violence in Northern Rakhine, and two Reuters reporters who documented a mass killing with chilling detail remain jailed in Myanmar.
The continuing refusal by Myanmar’s authorities to acknowledge any atrocities against Rohingya civilians worries many of those sheltering in Bangladesh.
Rohingya community leaders in the Bangladesh camps say they will return only if Myanmar’s government gives them the same basic rights it has given the country’s dozens of other ethnic minority groups.
Why does Bangladesh want them to go?
Bangladesh is an overcrowded and flood-prone nation. And with more Rohingya now crammed into the border district where their camps are located than there are native Bangladeshis, political and economic concerns are beginning to trump the remarkable hospitality that many residents have shown the refugees.
To provide shelter for the influx of Rohingya, vast tracts of forest and farmland have been cleared.
Prices for everything from building supplies to cooking oil have skyrocketed, while local wages have declined because of a sudden surge in Rohingya desperate for any kind of work.
Bangladesh’s government says it is proceeding with a controversial plan to turn an uninhabited, low-lying island in the Bay of Bengal into a new shelter for the Rohingya.
Still, even the question of who would pay for the repatriation has yet to be answered, much less whether Myanmar is willing to halt violence against the Rohingya.
When are repatriations to begin?
Last month, technically.
In the repatriation agreement signed last November, Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed to the return of willing Rohingya who could prove they had fled to Bangladesh since October 2016, when an earlier Rohingya insurgent assault catalysed a smaller exodus. The repatriation process was supposed to begin by Jan 23. That deadline was quietly delayed without much clarity on when the new start date for repatriations might be.
A further agreement was signed mid lastmonth, stipulating that Rohingya returns should be completed within a two-year period. But apart from a token number of people who have returned to Myanmar, including some Hindu families, no one is rushing back.
Where would Rohingya returnees live?
The Myanmar government has built camps, rows of grim longhouses in Rakhine in which repatriated Rohingya are supposed to stay for an unspecified period of time. The compounds are surrounded by barbed-wire fences and bear an uncomfortable similarity to concentration camps. There is little in the way of trees or shade — and no signs of accessible fields or paddies that could support Rohingya communities.
Human Rights Watch has called these camps “open-air prisons”.
When and if the Rohingya would be allowed to return to their own villages, many of which were razed by fire, is not clear. Myanmar has begun transferring some land that it terms “abandoned” to other owners.
Unable to leave the camps without special permission, the Rohingya remaining in central Rakhine are dependent on aid to survive. Yet international aid groups say that since the Rohingya insurgent attacks last August it has been much more difficult to deliver food and other necessities to these ghettos.