Delay for return of Muslim refugees
DHAKA, Bangladesh — The gradual repatriation of more than 680,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees back to Myanmar from Bangladesh, scheduled to begin Tuesday, has been delayed amid widespread fears that they are being forced to return, Bangladesh said Monday.
The refugees began pouring across the border into Bangladesh in August, fleeing waves of attacks by Myanmar security forces and Buddhist mobs.
While the two countries have signed an agreement to begin sending people home in “safety, security and dignity,” the process has been chaotic and opaque, leaving international aid workers and many Rohingya afraid they would be coerced into going back to villages that they fled only months ago.
Abul Kalam, Bangladesh’s refugee and repatriation commissioner, said a number of issues remain unresolved.
“The main thing is that the process has to be voluntary,” said Kalam, adding that paperwork for returning refugees had not yet been finalized and transit camps had yet to be built in Bangladesh. It was not immediately clear when the process would start.
“If they send us back forcefully we will not go,” said Sayed Noor, who fled his village in Myanmar in August, adding that Myanmar authorities “have to give us our rights and give us justice.”
David Mathieson, a longtime human rights researcher who has spent years working on Rohingya issues, heaped scorn on the repatriation agreement ahead of the latest announcement.
“It’s a fantasyland, make-believe world that both governments are in,” he said in an interview in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city, noting that security forces there had just forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya across the border. “Now you’re expecting them to come back, as if they’re in a conga line of joy after what you did to them?”
The Rohingya Muslims have long been treated as outsiders in largely Buddhist Myanmar, derided as “Bengalis” who entered illegally from Bangladesh, even though generations of Rohingya have lived in Myanmar. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982, effectively rendering them stateless. They are denied freedom of movement and other basic rights.
The spike in refugees fleeing Myanmar last summer came after an underground insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, attacked at least 30 security outposts in late August. The military and Buddhist mobs then launched retaliatory attacks on Rohingya across Rakhine in a frenzy of killings, rapes and burned villages. The United Nations has described the violence as “textbook ethnic cleansing.”
Also Monday, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson met with Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi to discuss the refugee situation and to urge the release two detained Myanmar journalists who had been covering the crisis.
Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration, has a history of negotiating with governments hostile to the United States, including North Korea and Iraq.