Press TV
Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh and experts say a
recent deal between Myanmar and the United Nations (UN) falls short of
guaranteeing the Muslims’ safe return to Myanmar, where thousands of them have
already been killed in state-sponsored violence.
The UN Development Program (UNDP) on Wednesday signed an
agreement with the Myanmarese government to return some of the 700,000 Rohingya
refugees who have fled persecution in their villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine State
and who are now living in crowded makeshift camps in Bangladesh.
UN, Myanmar ink deal on access to Rakhine http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/06/06/564145/UN-Myanmar-deal-Rohingya-repatriations
The deal has, however, disconcerted the refugees, who say
they won’t return unless they are given safety guarantees and citizenship by
the Myanmarese government, according to the Associated Press.
Though the Muslim community has lived in Myanmar for
generations, its members are denied citizenship by the government in Naypyidaw,
which persistently describes them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, where
they are also denied citizenship.
In the deal between the UN and Myanmar, the Muslims have
not been referred to by their common name — the Rohingya. Instead, they have
been referred to merely as “displaced persons,” potentially indicating that the
UN has adopted the Myanmarese government position.
Thousands of Rohingya Muslims were killed, arbitrarily
arrested, or raped by Myanmarese soldiers and Buddhist mobs mainly between
November 2016 and August 2017, when many of the surviving members started
fleeing to Bangladesh en masse.
In their absence, the government has bulldozed their villages,
built new housing structures, and shuttled Buddhist citizens from elsewhere in
the country to populate the area.
The UN has described the campaign as a textbook example
of “ethnic cleansing” and possibly “genocide.”
The refugees now demand a UN security force to guarantee
their safe return to their villages, according to a Saturday piece on the
Anadolu news agency by experts, who described the new agreement as inadequate.
Experts Maung Zarni and Natalie Brinham warned the UN
that sending the Rohingya back home “could potentially result in another round
of mass killings, further decades of containment in concentration camps or
deliberate slow starvation,” — all of which have happened to the Muslims in the
past.
They argued that the refugees remained “largely
unpersuaded” by the repatriation deal because it did not guarantee their safe
return.
“The conditions on the ground indicate no semblance of
physical safety for any returning Rohingyas,” they wrote.
They said “there is little prospect for their
reintegration into the predominantly Buddhist society,” adding that “the
frightening prospects of being marched back to Myanmar’s ‘killing fields,’ has
unnerved Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.”
UN officials, however, said the agreement was an
important first step. They said it would create a “framework of cooperation”
designed to create conditions for the “voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable”
repatriation of the Rohingya.
A recent report by the humanitarian group, Doctors
without Borders, said at least 9,400 Rohingyas were killed in Rakhine from
August 25 to September 24 last year. It
revealed that the deaths of 71.7 percent or 6,700 Rohingyas were caused
by violence. That figure included 730 children below the age of 5, according to
Doctors without Borders.