Three Years of Rohingya Influx Myanmar apathy almost stalls repatriation

The Myanmar government has almost stalled the Rohingya reparation process resorting to various means, including near discontinuation of clearing of names of the refugees eligible to go back to the country and an unwillingness to hold meetings of the bilateral joint working group and the tripartite mechanism led by China.

The military-led Myanmar authorities have cleared merely 10,033 Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh in two phases from lists of some 598,219 members of the community handed over to them in five phases in the last three years, according to government officials. 

Myanmar has continued to decline holding a meeting of the joint working group in the last one and a half years on various pleas, and the last excuse was the COVID-19 pandemic.

The last JWG meeting was held in Myanmar in April, 2019.

We are now faced with a strategy of creating obstacles for prospective returnees, which the Myanmar authorities seemed to have adopted and they are doing whatever is necessary to frustrate the effort of repatriation, foreign secretary Masud Bin Momen said on Monday.

The Myanmar government has not kept its unwillingness to take back Rohingya people a secret, a Bangladesh diplomat said, adding that they almost stopped the entire process in violation of formal and informal commitments made bilaterally and on multilateral platforms.

The two-layer tripartite mechanism led by China to oversee the progress in the voluntary repatriation process has also come almost to a halt due to reluctance on the part of the Myanmar authorities.    

There has been hardly any progress in creating an environment in Rakhine conducive to the return of the members of its forcefully displaced minority community to their ancestral home from makeshift camps in Cox’s Bazar of Bangladesh, according to UN sources in Myanmar.

There has been no effort in the last three years to restore the villages, which were destroyed in the latest atrocities committed by the Myanmar military and its cohorts since 25 August 2017, to normalcy, said an UN official in Myanmar.

‘It is clear that they have drifted away from the commitments they made,’ said an UN official in Dhaka.

The urge from the international communities to create scopes for Rohingya people in Myanmar to participate in political, social, economic and cultural activities fell on deaf ears and its fulfilment has remained a far cry, as the Myanmar authorities continued to block the members of the community from running for political offices.

Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said in a tweet on August 19, ‘The Myanmar government is blocking Rohingya Muslims from running for political office, using the old excuse that they or their parents are not citizens  despite long ancestry in Myanmar.

The Myanmar election commission rejected candidature of six Rohingya aspirants willing to contest the national elections set for November 8, claiming that they were ‘Bengalis’, Fortify Rights, a rights organisation, said in a press release.

‘I am an ethnic [Rohingya] Muslim born in Yangon, and both of my parents are Myanmar citizens, but [the authorities] rejected me by branding me a “Bengali”,’ Khin Khin Lwin said expressing her frustration, according to Fortify Rights. 

The Myanmar side agreed in the last JWG meeting for forging deeper engagement with the Rohingya communities in the camps in Cox’s Bazar to convince them of the steps undertaken so far to receive the forcibly displaced people to Rakhine, but there was no progress, a camp in-charge under the office of refugee relief and repatriation commissioner said with reference to the failure of the two repatriation attempts — one in 2018 and another in 2019 — due to lack of trust on the Myanmar authorities.

Some 860,000 Rohingyas, mostly women, children and aged people, entered Bangladesh fleeing unbridled murder, arson and rape during ‘security operations’ by Myanmar military in Rakhine, what the United Nations denounced as ethnic cleansing and genocide, beginning from August 25, 2017.

The latest Rohingya influx took the number of undocumented Myanmar nationals and registered refugees in Bangladesh to over 1.1 million, according to estimates by UN agencies and Bangladesh foreign ministry.

The Bangladesh government has transferred about 306 Rohingya people to Bhasan Char, an island under Noakhali district, as they attempted to go abroad by boat with the help of human traffickers.

Since the outset, Bangladesh has been emphasising in all meetings the need for concrete steps to create a conducive environment in Rakhine State by removing legal and administrative barriers to ensure basic rights of the returnees, including freedom of movement, guaranteeing safety and security, and drawing up a plan towards a well-defined time-bound pathway to citizenship that would encourage the Myanmar residents to return voluntarily.

Bangladesh’s foreign secretary said that the government would continue to pursue a comprehensive mechanism — bilateral, regional, multilateral and international engagements — for sustainable repatriation as well as ensuring accountability and justice for permanent solutions to the crisis.

Myanmar was facing separate investigations under the UN and the prosecution of the International Criminal Court on allegations of intent of genocide and atrocity crimes committed against the minority community.   

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net