There’s No Safe Repatriation for Myanmar’s Rohingya

Judah Grunstein                                                                                                                      Oct 29, 2026 Rohingya refugees at an event marking the anniversary of their exodus, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Aug. 25, 2026 (AP Photo by Abdul Goni)

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with our sister publication, GlobalPost.

 Late last month, Malaysia deported almost 1,500 Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar, amid immigration raids that have led to the detention of more than 50,000 other Rohingya this year. Now, officials in Bangladesh are likewise discussing repatriation of Rohingya refugees with the Myanmar junta.

But for Mohammad Syed Ullah, a Rohingya who has spent the past nine years in a sprawling refugee camp in Bangladesh, the current conditions in Myanmar make returning home too dangerous to consider.

“We want to go back … and live a normal life,” Ullah told the Daily Star, a Bangladeshi newspaper. “It cannot simply mean taking us across the border. After our return, there must be guarantees of security, rights, citizenship, freedom of movement and livelihoods.”

Ullah is one of about 1.2 million Rohingya currently living in Bangladesh, primarily in camps around Cox’s Bazar in the southeast as well as on Bhasan Char, an island in the Bay of Bengal. Most fled western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where most of the country’s Rohingya are concentrated, in 2017, when a brutal military campaign there led to accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice. But about 150,000 more have arrived since early 2024, as war engulfed the province again.

Even before the 2017 exodus, decades of persecution and violence had driven the predominantly Muslim Rohingya to migrate from Buddhist-majority Myanmar to countries across South and Southeast Asia. Now, however, Rohingya communities in India, Malaysia and elsewhere across the region increasingly face hostility, detention or pressure to leave.

Last year, India expelled hundreds of Rohingya to Bangladesh and Myanmar, with refugees telling Amnesty International that they were assaulted and robbed by Indian authorities. Fear of similar treatment drove many others to flee India. Malaysia is now following suit.

As for Bangladesh, shrinking aid, insecurity and scant opportunities are making an indefinite stay there increasingly difficult. But ongoing civil war in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar leaves little hope of a safe return.

“Safe repatriation is simply not possible,” Ronan Lee, a researcher at Loughborough University in the U.K. and author of the 2021 book, “Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide,” told Deutsche Welle. “Life in Myanmar today would be more dangerous for the Rohingya than when they were forcibly deported in 2017,” he added, due to the civil war but also the fact that Myanmar’s government is dominated by the same military accused of genocide in 2017.

In Rakhine, the ruling junta has lost most of the state to the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine armed group that has itself been accused of killings, torture, forced recruitment and displacement of Rohingya, as well as of seizing their land and preventing their return.

At the same time, Myanmar does not recognize the Rohingya as one of its 135 officially recognized ethnic groups. Instead it labels them as “Bengalis,” or migrants from Bangladesh, even though the Rohingya have lived in Rakhine for generations. As a result, the Rohingya are denied passports.

In a WPR briefing in September, Tun Khin—a U.K.-based Rohingya activist—and Daniel P. Sullivan wrote that “the lack of pathways to a better future” is among the greatest challenges facing refugees in Bangladesh. “None of the U.N.’s traditional solutions to displacement—return, integration or resettlement—have been viable for the vast majority of Rohingya.”

Bangladesh, which shelters the world’s largest Rohingya refugee population, insists they must ultimately return to Myanmar. However, falling international support and worsening insecurity in the camps are stretching resources and wearing out Bangladeshi patience. The severely overcrowded camps have become rife with criminality and violence as their inhabitants become increasingly desperate in the face of cuts to food rations and limited educational and work opportunities.

“Rising xenophobia, donor fatigue, shrinking humanitarian budgets, misinformation and domestic political pressures now shape the Rohingya’s future as much as events inside Myanmar,” Yuyun Wahyuningrum wrote in July for the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. As “domestic pressures grow, host governments are becoming less willing—and less able—to sustain long-term protection for Rohingya refugees.”

As a result, many refugees now attempt to make perilous boat journeys to Malaysia or Indonesia in search of work or safety. This, says Jessica Olney, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia who studies Rohingya displacement, exposes them to greater risk of human trafficking or death.

“Forget about going back right now,” Olney told NPR. “People are still coming in, and nobody seems to talk pragmatically about that.”

Judah Grunstein is World Politics Review editor-at-large. He was editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2025. You can follow him on BlueSky at @judah-grunstein.bksy.social.