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. There was no immediate confirmation from Myanmar.
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.
Myanmar officials could not be reached for comment.
“If they send us back forcefully we will not go,” Sayed Noor, who fled his village in Myanmar in August, said over the weekend, adding that Myanmar authorities “have to give us our rights and give us justice.”
“They will have to return all our wealth that they have looted and hold people accountable. They will have to compensate us. We came here because we are fighting for those things,” he said. “If we don’t get all of this, then what was the point of coming here?”
Eventually, all the Rohingya who have fled Myanmar since August were to leave Bangladesh, according to the agreement signed late last year. Over the weekend, the U.N.’s migration agency increased the total estimate of those refugees to 688,000.
David Mathieson, a longtime human rights researcher who has spent years working on Rohingya issues, heaped scorn on the 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.
Many of the people who fled earlier violence and moved into displacement camps inside Myanmar have been unable to leave those settlements for years.
Most Rohingya lived in poverty in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, near the Bangladesh border. Marked by their religion and their language – most Rohingya speak a dialect of Bengali, while most of their neighbors speak Rakhine – they are easy to target.