First Rohingya refugees ‘accepted into Burma’
BURMA has accepted what appears to be the first five among some 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled military-led violence against the minority group.
This is despite the United Nations saying it is not yet safe for them to return home.
A government statement said five members of a family returned to western Rakhine state from a refugee camp across the border in Bangladesh.
The statement said that authorities determined whether they had lived in the country and provided them with a national verification card – a form of ID that doesn’t equate to citizenship. Rohingya have been denied citizenship in Buddhist-majority Burma, where they have faced persecution for decades.
It said that the family was staying temporarily with relatives in Maungdaw town, the administrative centre close to the border. The statement did not say if any more repatriations are being planned.
Bangladesh has given Burma, also known as Myanmar, a list of more than 8,000 refugees to begin the repatriation, but it has been further delayed by a complicated verification process. The two countries agreed in December to begin repatriating them in January, but they were delayed by concerns among aid workers and Rohingya that they would be forced to return and face unsafe conditions in Burma.
Hundreds of Rohingya were reportedly killed in recent violence, with many houses and villages burned to the ground. The United Nations and the US have described the army crackdown as “ethnic cleansing”.
On Friday, the UN refugee agency and Bangladesh finalised a memorandum of understanding that describes the repatriation process as “safe, voluntary and dignified ... in line with international standards”.
UN refugee agency UNHCR said it “considers that conditions in Myanmar are not yet conducive for returns to be safe, dignified and sustainable”.
It added: “The responsibility for creating such conditions remains with the Myanmar authorities, and these must go beyond the preparation of physical infrastructure to facilitate logistical arrangements.”
Early this week, Burmese social welfare minister Win Myat Aye met with about 40 Rohingya refugees at the Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh for more than an hour, sometimes exchanging heated words.