The Bangladesh and Myanmar governments have announced the ‘voluntary’ return of the Rohingya refugees back to their home province in Myanmar. This decision left the Rohingya terrified. Back in Myanmar nothing has changed: no one was punished for the atrocities that gave birth to the refugee crisis in the first place while the human rights violations of the government continue unhindered by any external authority. Could the return to such a place ever be called ‘voluntary’?
The world’s fastest growing refugee crisis
The Rohingya are a large predominantly Muslim minority in Myanmar (formerly Burma) with the majority living in the northern province of Rakhine. The government of Myanmar, a state mostly Buddhist, denied them citizenship and treated them as illegal immigrants from the neighbouring Bangladesh instead.
Ever since August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar for Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This exodus was caused by what the UN called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, characterised by mass killings, arson, rape, and other crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Myanmar authorities against Rohingya civilians. The Myanmar authorities have denied any such systematic violence, and have imprisoned Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the two Reuters journalists who exposed these atrocities.
Cox’s Bazar now holds the largest refugee camp for Rohingya with the concentration of refugees being among the densest in the world. The humanitarian agencies in the region, coordinated by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), have been delivering food aid and treating thousands of refugees for malnutrition in the past months. Although they have access to basic necessities, the Rohingya refugees are still living in highly vulnerable conditions in Bangladesh, with the monsoon season currently unfolding and the intense dependency on international humanitarian aid.
Terror in the refugee camps
On 30 October, the leaders in Dhaka announced a bilateral agreement with Myanmar to start sending back some of the refugees living in the nine settlements and refugee camps in Bangladesh. This decision would be in violation of non-refoulement, the fundamental principle of international law that absolutely forbids states to return asylum seekers to a country in which they could face persecution or torture.
After the decision of repatriation was made public, panic spread within the camps with refugees fearing that they would be killed if returned to Myanmar. Bangladeshi security forces have already been deployed to refugee camps to start the process, and the officials in Dhaka have reportedly compiled a list of 4,000 Rohingya to be returned this week, with their identities not being made public. Fearing that their name might be on this list, some refugees have already fled from the camps, going into hiding or planning to embark on an unsafe journey by boat to Southeast Asia, while others have even attempted suicide.
The international reaction
Michelle Bachelet, the UN human rights chief, declared that “returning Rohingya refugees to Myanmar at this point effectively means throwing them back into the cycle of human rights violations that this community has been suffering for decades”.
NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also called on friends and donors to advocate for the halt of any attempts to return the Rohingya back to Myanmar. These organisations insist that, to be fully legal, repatriation must only be conducted voluntarily, with international monitoring of the refugees’ human rights and safety, which would not be the case with the Rohingya.
The Bangladeshi authorities have publicly guaranteed that only the Rohingya who have expressed a wish to return to Myanmar will be repatriated. However, according to Mohammed, one of the refugees in the camps, the same authorities are also saying that “we are foreign settlers. My grandfather had a citizenship card. My mother. My father. My older brother. But they say I am not a citizen. This is forced. This is involuntary. Not one person in the camps wants to go back.”
Is Myanmar now safe for the Rohingya?
In Rakhine State nothing has changed that could make the Rohingya refugees’ return safe. No one has been held accountable for the atrocities which gave birth to the exodus in the first place, while the majority of the Rohingya left in Myanmar are still being discriminated by the government. Their everyday reality involves living in unfit villages or camps, without the right to move freely or access hospitals and schools when they need to.
The authorities in Myanmar severely control access of the international media to Rakhine and only a few UN and humanitarian agencies have been allowed to operate in the area. This led the East Asia Director at Amnesty International, Nicholas Bequelin, to describe the Rakhine State as “an information black hole. Without international oversight, it will be extremely difficult to monitor the situation of anyone who returns”. Myanmar seems to be just as dangerous for the Rohingya as it was in August 2017.