By MOE MYINT 28 May 2018
YANGON – President U Win Myint has pardoned 58 displaced
Rohingya who were detained while attempting to re-enter the country from
Bangladesh.
According to a brief statement released by the State
Counsellor’s Office on Sunday, 62 returnees were arrested by local authorities
for illegally crossing the border. The group was attempting to return to
strife-torn northern Rakhine State’s Maungdaw Township from a refugee camp in
Bangladesh. They were traveling independently, and not according to procedures
outlined in an official refugee repatriation agreement between Myanmar and
Bangladesh signed on Nov. 23, 2017.
Cases against four of the detainees were later dropped.
The statement did not specify how many were ultimately imprisoned, or under
which articles of the criminal code. It did not name the home villages of those
arrested.
According to the statement, the group was returning from
a camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazaar. This is the first time any refugees have
attempted to return from Bangladesh, it said.
Despite the bilateral agreement, not a single person had
been officially repatriated as of Monday. In April, a five-member family led by
Alphata Arlon — an administrative official from Taungpyo Let Yar — who spent
several months camped on the Myanmar side of the border voluntarily re-entered
the Taungpyo Let Wei refugee reception center.
According to Sunday’s statement, authorities released the
detained returnees to Nga Khu Ya reception camp from Buthidaung Prison in order
to fill out the necessary forms as specified under the bilateral agreement.
Next they will be temporarily settled in Hla Phoe Khaung transit camp, a
separate location in northern Maungdaw. The statement avoided applying the
contentious terms “Rohingya” or “Bengali” and simply referred to them as
“displaced persons.”
The statement adds that authorities will not take action
against any of the returnees unless they were involved in attacks by the Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on government security outposts in August 2017.
In response to the attacks, the Myanmar Army launched a counter-terrorism
campaign that drove nearly 700,000 Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh,
creating what is currently the biggest refugee camp in the world. The Army has
been accused of causing mass devastation and committing rights violations and
arbitrary killings.
The United Nations Security Council, which sent a team to
visit Bangladesh and northern Rakhine in early May, has described the military
campaign as “ethnic cleansing” and urged Myanmar to cooperate in a credible
independent investigation into alleged abuses by security forces and to allow
the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights to return to Myanmar. The E.U.
and the U.S. have imposed targeted sanctions against top military generals
responsible for the violence in Maungdaw, while international human rights
groups have called on the U.N. to bring high-ranking military officials before
the International Criminal Court.