If the situation in Myanmar’s
Rakhine state does not instill confidence in the Rohingya refugees, voluntary
repatriation would be impossible.
February 08, 2022
Rohingya children gather sticks at a refugee camp in Cox’s
Bazar, Bangladesh, March 2018.Credit: UN
Women/Allison Joyce
Bangladesh and Myanmar
have resumed talks on repatriating Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar.
The first-ever meeting of the recently formed technical level
Ad-Hoc Task Force for Verification of the Displaced Persons from Rakhine was
held virtually on January 27. During the meeting, “both sides expressed readiness”
to continue working closely to address “reasons causing delay in the
verification” of the past residency of those displaced from Myanmar’s Rakhine
state, a statement issued by the Bangladesh Foreign Office said.
Repatriation talks had been in a state of suspension since the
Myanmar military staged a coup on February 1 last year.
The resumption of repatriation talks will be welcomed in
Bangladesh. The country has been bearing a heavy burden in providing refuge to
hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled persecution in Myanmar over the
decades. Since August 25, 2017, Bangladesh has been hosting over 1.1 million
Rohingyas.
The majority-Muslim Rohingya have lived for centuries in
Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
While the flow of Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine region into
areas that comprise today’s Bangladesh began in 1942, when nearly 22,000 people crossed
the Naf river and entered the Bengal region, the roots of the current crisis
can be traced back to 1962. The military coup that year resulted in the
Rohingya – like other ethnic groups in Myanmar – being denied the right to
vote. The Rohingya, however, were subjected to other restrictions and
discrimination as well. The 1982 Citizenship Act of Myanmar formally denied the
group citizenship rights, as a result of which the Rohingya are today that
largest stateless community in the world.
In the decades since, the Myanmar state has subjected the
Rohingya to systematic discrimination, even persecution. In addition to
stripping them of their rights, including citizenship rights, it has subjected
them to extreme violence. This has triggered an exodus of
hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Many have
headed to neighboring Bangladesh. In 1992, for instance, some 250,000 Rohingya
fled to Bangladesh.
Since 1992, the flow of Rohingya escaping persecution in Myanmar
into Bangladesh has happened at regular intervals. In 2017-18, a coordinated
campaign of military violence, which a United Nations fact-finding mission
deemed as genocide, forced
over a million Rohingya to
seek refuge in Bangladesh.
After some initial resistance, Bangladesh opened its border to
the Rohingya on humanitarian grounds. Camps in Cox’s Bazar, which borders
Rakhine state, provided them a temporary home.
Rohingya repatriation has been a challenging problem for
Bangladesh, with processes and agreements proving to be still-born.
On November 23, 2017, Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a repatriation agreement.
However, the two sides had not agreed on a concrete process of repatriation or
on a deadline for completion of the repatriation. They did not disclose the
contents of the agreement either. Rohingya organizations worldwide criticized the agreement as
it envisaged moving refugees back to Myanmar when a “congenial atmosphere” for
their “safe and voluntary repatriation with dignity and honor” had not been
created. They called for the UNHCR’s involvement in the repatriation process
and for citizenship to be restored to the Rohingya.
Two subsequent repatriation attempts failed.
In November 2018, 2,260 Rohingya were identified for repatriation. The attempt
failed as they refused to return to Myanmar without assurances for their
safety.
In August 2019, of a list of 55,000 Rohingya 3,450 were cleared
for repatriation. However, Rohingya leaders were skeptical about the
repatriation process. They were not aware of any repatriation plan of the
government, they said, and demanded that safety, security, and citizenship be
made preconditions for repatriation.
“We don’t know what is happening… We will only repatriate
through dialogues (about the preconditions). Without dialogues, no
repatriation,” Rohingya community leader Mohib Ullah, who was subsequently
assassinated in 2021, said.
At a tripartite virtual meeting
mediated by China in January 2021, Bangladesh put forward a proposal for a
village-based repatriation process, so that those returning home would feel
safe. But Myanmar said that it would like to start off by repatriating 42,000
refugees who had been verified from a list of some 830,000 Rohingyas living in
camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.
At the meeting, Myanmar sought assurances that the Rohingya
would abide by Myanmar’s laws, and China and Myanmar responded positively to
Dhaka’s suggestion to keep an international community presence in Rakhine when
Rohingya repatriation began. The meeting appears to have gone well. “I would
say we remain cautiously optimistic,” Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen told
the Bangladeshi media after the meeting.
A little over a week later, the Myanmar military staged a coup.
This put the repatriation process on ice. A tripartite Bangladesh-China-Myanmar
working group meeting scheduled for February 4 never happened.
Over the past year, Myanmar has been plunged into chaos and
conflict. Military offensives, which include aerial bombing of villages and
civilians, have triggered new population flows out of the country. There is no
doubt that this civil conflict will hamper peaceful and voluntary repatriation
of the Rohingya.
The recent virtual meeting was a bilateral meeting, and China
was not directly involved in it.
Bangladesh has not been successful in involving its development
partners to facilitate the repatriation of the Rohingya back to their homeland.
Indeed, some of its development partners have backed the Myanmar state on the
Rohingya issue.
This was the case, for instance, when China and Russia supported
Myanmar on a United Nations General Assembly resolution on human rights
violations against the Rohingya on December 31, 2020. Surprisingly, India abstained from
the vote. China and India are influential in Myanmar to some extent as they are
Naypyidaw’s development partners.
In the current political situation in Myanmar, China and Russia
have the most clout of any foreign governments. While Russia is a major weapons
supplier, China is Myanmar’s number one investor. Both are U.N. Security
Council veto-wielding powers and hence, in a position to push the Myanmar
military to take robust measures to speed up repatriation of the Rohingya.
China and Russia have strong ties with Bangladesh too and Dhaka
should use the country’s strategic and rising economic importance to get them
to facilitate the repatriation process.
It is time the international community recognized that it is not
the responsibility of Bangladesh alone to find a sustainable solution for the
Rohingya problem.
The U.N.’s disassociation from the
repatriation process, apparently at Myanmar’s insistence, has
delayed repatriation. It has resulted in a situation where there is no neutral
body to help iron out logistical problems.
Both the Bangladesh and Myanmar governments have failed to
rebuild the broken trust of the Rohingya. If trust is not built among the
Rohingya, voluntary repatriation would be impossible. While neither Bangladesh
nor the UNHCR have done much with regard to building confidence or trust in the
Rohingya refugee camps, Myanmar has done little on the ground in Rakhine state
or on the question of Rohingya citizenship to instill confidence in the
Rohingya wanting to return home. It hasn’t done much to create an environment
for peaceful repatriation.
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