46 Rohingya Return to Myanmar’s Rakhine State

Rakhine State—Forty-six Rohingya voluntarily returned to Rakhine State’s Maungdaw Township from Bangladesh on Thursday.

Forty-two of them entered Maungdaw through the Nga Khura border gate and four others entered through Taungpyo Letwei after officially reporting their return to local authorities, according to Maungdaw district administrator U Soe Aung.

He said he had not yet received the list of how many men and how many women are among the returnees.

Two of the returnees previously lived in Pan Taw Pyin Village, said village community elder U Anawar. “I am in Nga Khura as I heard that two of the returnees are from my village. The immigration department is now taking their photos for record-keeping purposes. Then I will take the two back to the village and assist them with their rehabilitation,” U Anawar told The Irrawaddy.

The returnees reportedly provided authorities with a list of who would be returning in advance. Upon their arrival, authorities checked the returnees’ identities to make sure they were on the list before resettling them.

Authorities also checked the refugees against a list of suspected members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the group allegedly responsible for coordinated attacks against Myanmar security forces in Maungdaw in August 2017.

In September, 26 Rohingya returned voluntarily to Rakhine from Bangladesh. Authorities arrested one of them on suspicion of having ties to ARSA.

So far, a total of 397 Rohingya have voluntarily returned independently of bilateral agreement procedures established between the Myanmar and Bangladeshi governments. The refugees have returned both by boat and on foot across the border, according to the Maungdaw District General Administration Department.

Authorities are resettling the returnees and many have gone to live with family members while the government constructs homes in the areas where some of the Rohingya villages stood before they were destroyed.

Authorities have also provided the returnees with humanitarian and rehabilitation support as outlined by the Office of the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development in Rakhine (UEHRD).

On Oct. 11, 10 Rohingya returnees met with ambassadors of ASEAN countries. The ambassadors asked them about their reasons for returning and their current living conditions.

For returnees under the official bilateral agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh, the Myanmar government opened two reception centers in early 2018: one in Taungpyo Letwei, for those returning over the land border, and one in Nga Khura for those returning by boat. However, no one has officially returned under the bilateral agreement.

Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed that the repatriation program will adhere to the terms of the bilateral agreement signed between the two countries on Nov. 23, 2017.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians from Rakhine, including more than 400 displaced Hindu civilians, are still living in refugee camps in Bangladesh.

The Myanmar government has released details about the suspected perpetrators of the attacks in August 2017, including their pictures and names. U Soe Aung said officials have been checking all the voluntary returnees against the data that authorities have on the suspects, in accordance with the law and regulations.

The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have demanded to be allowed to return safely and with dignity, to be recognized as citizens, to be permitted to return to their homes, and to be given freedom of movement.

A brief history of the word “Rohingya” at the heart of a humanitarian crisis

The Rohingya are a largely Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar at the center of a humanitarian catastrophe. But the Myanmar government won’t even use the word “Rohingya,” let alone admit they’re being persecuted. Instead, the government calls them Bengalis, foreigners, or worse, terrorists.

This difference between these two terms—Rohingya and Bengali—is crucial to understanding the crisis unfolding in Myanmar, where more than 500,000 Rohingya have recently fled following a government crackdown and which has been called a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing by the top United Nations human-rights official. Many of those ended up sheltering in makeshift camps in Bangladesh, telling tales of the killings, rape, and massacres.

Before the massacres, there were thought to be around 1.1 million Rohingya living in the country. The Rohingya have existed in Myanmar—a Buddhist majority country—for centuries. It was known as Burma under British colonial rule (from 1824-1948) and there was significant migration between today’s Myanmar, India, and Bangladesh. Once Burma won independence in 1945, the government passed the Union Citizenship Act (pdf), which detailed the ethnicities “indigenous” to Myanmar. The Rohingya were not considered to be one of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups.

That said, the Rohingya were able to carve a place for themselves in newly independent Burma; with some serving in parliament and other high offices. And their ethnicity was included in the 1961 census.

The situation quickly deteriorated for the Rohingya, however, following the 1962 military coup, when the government—driven by Bamar-supremacist ideology (paywall)—gave fewer official documentation to the Rohingya and refused to fully recognize new generations of the Rohingya population. In 1974, all citizens in Burma were required to get national registration cards, but the Rohingya were only allowed to obtain foreign registration cards.

By 1982, a new citizenship law was passed that prevented Rohingya from easily accessing full citizenship, rendering many of them stateless. In 1989, the country was renamed Myanmar.

It’s not just the Rohingya, outbreaks of violence have affected non-Rohingya Muslims across Myanmar. Certain extremist monks have intensified the Islamophobic rhetoric in the country, claiming Myanmar’s dominant Buddhist faith is under threat from Muslims (pointing to Afghanistan and Indonesia as examples). These monks were crucial in passing “race and religion” laws that targeted Muslims and attempted to stem their population growth.

In 2009, a UN spokeswoman described the Rohingya as “probably the most friendless people in the world” and it’s easy to see why. In 2015, the plight of the Rohingya was brought to the forefront when boats packed with Rohingya migrants were left stranded at sea. The Rohingya—collectively dubbed across international media as “boat people”—were stuck because they were turned away from a number of Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Unwanted in Myanmar, the Rohingya are also often rejected from the countries they hope to flee to.

Since the late 1970s, nearly one million Rohingya are estimated to have fled Myanmar. The 2014 census—which the UN helped conduct—banned the use of the term “Rohingya.”