For close to a decade, I have been in rooms with various ethnic groups and their political wings, with figures of Myanmar authority and politics and, more instructively, with the Rohingya themselves. Negotiating in conflict environments teaches us that political settlements are not stumbled upon but rather formed when people show up and try to build them together.
One of the people who kept showing up was Mohib Ullah. He was my friend—a science teacher from Maungdaw, known in the camps as “Mastor Shahib.” He repeatedly said that his people were not stateless, that they had a state, and that state was Myanmar. He kept records, too, names of the dead and children of 2017 and lists of those at risk. After our last meeting in a camp, I asked him to stop walking me to my car because of safety reasons. He smiled and said that if he stopped walking, everyone would live in fear, which was exactly what the criminals wanted. He was murdered in his office on September 29, 2021. The killing was aimed at his push for repatriation—a stark reminder of what the delay in this process costs and who pays for it.
The Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office has administered the largest refugee settlement on earth under conditions that would break most administrations. Host communities gave up land, resources, and quiet on a scale that few societies have been asked to bear. Donor countries, humanitarian agencies, and the taxpayers who fund them have sustained an operation without precedent in this region. Bangladesh government’s own commission on Rohingya refugee affairs has placed the issue at the centre of national decision-making. None of it has yet produced a viable path to repatriation, and that is a failure not of will but of form.
The issue has been worked along three separate lines—bilateral and trilateral negotiation, a humanitarian operation, and a periodic appeal to conscience—each run competently. But three defensible efforts in parallel do not constitute a strategy. Meanwhile, the world has changed. Funding is declining, the ground in Rakhine is no longer held by a single party across the table, and a second generation is growing up in the camps without any memory of the place they must return to. Every year of drift turns a repatriation problem into a permanent population problem with stark implications. That is how a displacement crisis hardens into a cultural, identity, and resource crisis with no natural end.
What is required, then, is a single national instrument—a serious national strategy—that will name the conditions for return rather than merely gesture at them, attaching published indicators to each so that return is facilitated against a standard rather than announced against a calendar. It will treat the camps and the host district as facilitators of return rather than a waiting room, and improve their conditions in the coming months. It will shift international efforts from maintenance towards skills and market creation for eventual lawful employment in Myanmar; engage every counterpart who can move the outcome; keep accountability and repatriation on separate tracks so that neither is traded for the other; and ask partners for defined roles and milestones rather than sympathy alone.
The framework must also correct a framing error that has persisted since 2017—that this is not a bilateral issue between Dhaka and Naypyidaw. The cause lies inside Myanmar and so does the remedy; Bangladesh is merely where the consequence came. Asean, China, or the West treat it as something the two neighbours should settle between themselves, which is inaccurate. Rakhine also cannot be treated as a theatre with Myanmar as backdrop, since the decisions shaping it are taken elsewhere. A settlement there is a function of wider stabilisation. The ethnic groups and their armed formations matter, of course, but each is one party among several, and a strategy resting on a single interlocutor ends up having one point of failure.
Then there is the phrase “conducive conditions,” which governs every conversation about return but has never been defined. Undefined conditionality is indefinite deferral. It lets a counterparty postpone, prevents a partner from guaranteeing, and asks the Rohingya to consent against a standard nobody has offered. Write the conditions out, and the environment becomes something built and verified rather than awaited.
Anyone who has listened to the Rohingya knows the security question cannot be reduced to law enforcement. The expulsions there were not the Tatmadaw’s work alone. Communities participated, property changed hands locally, and the fear people voice in the camps is often a fear of the village rather than of the state. So, reconciliation and dual-community benefits are load-bearing, not decorative. Every project must be transactional and visibly serve Rakhine and Rohingya alike, because history there is unambiguous about what one-sided assistance produces.
The same realism applies to the issues of narcotics and scam centres. The narco trade running through these camps is not a Rohingya enterprise; it sits at the end of a chain whose laboratories, capital, and protection are inside Myanmar. The scam compounds that recruit from the camps answer to the same economy. China, Asean, and the West have a direct stake here, because the revenue ruining young people in Cox’s Bazar, Bangkok, and Kunming is also the revenue that arms the fighting in Rakhine and beyond. Addressing the trade at its origin will help shrink two problems.
Which brings me to the thing that nobody says aloud. Alone among the significant communities of Myanmar, the Rohingya field no armed organisation. ARSA does not represent them and never has, and civil Rohingya unity is a must to counter armed and criminal groups in the camps. Yet the world extends understanding to every other armed movement in Myanmar while treating Rohingya self-defence as unthinkable. I say this as a warning, not a proposal: protraction produces armed formation and no movement in Myanmar ever needed the state’s permission or weapons to come into being. Stabilising Rakhine and making repatriation moves visible will prove how the community’s civilian character holds. Leave a stateless people with no lawful route back home for another decade, and things may take a darker turn.
The economics point the same way. Myanmar can be labour-short, Rakhine most acutely, while Bangladesh holds a labour surplus—and among them sits a working-age displaced population that is Myanmar’s own. Skills, certification, lawful employment, and food production in Rakhine cost less than indefinite maintenance, and can turn a returnee into a contributor to Rakhine’s prosperity. My argument is always that return restores a workforce and a market without which Rakhine’s recovery is difficult.
Ultimately, the Rohingya community must be empowered rather than spoken for—with civilian leadership, identity retention, and a place in the forums deciding its future. The Rohingya must not be absent from settlement processes. That was Mastor Shahib’s whole argument. A camp, however humanely run, is not a home. A ration, however faithfully delivered, is not a livelihood. The desire to return is the oldest and most human one, and a strategy’s purpose should be to give it a road home.
Shahab Enam Khan teaches international relations at Jahangirnagar University and Bangladesh University of Professionals.
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