Rohingya campaigners condemn Myanmar’s ‘opaque’ repatriation plan

Bangladesh, Documents, Education, Help Refugees, Human Rights, Myanmar, Refugees Issues, Religious Rights

The Myanmar military’s “pilot project” to repatriate about 1,000 Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh has been met with scepticism, with rights campaigners calling it a “PR campaign”.

Last week, a delegation from Myanmar visited the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district – home to more than 1 million Rohingya – to interview potential candidates for their return as early as next month.

Nearly 800,000 Rohingya fled their homeland in Myanmar in 2017 after a brutal military crackdown during which thousands of the ethnic Muslim minority were killed, raped and their properties torched as part of a scorched-earth campaign.

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Tens of thousands of the persecuted Rohingya took shelter in Bangladesh before the 2017 crackdown that the United Nations said was carried out with “genocidal intent”. In a 2018 report, the UN called for army chief Min Aung Hlaing, and other generals, to face genocide charges.

The Rohingya left in Myanmar suffer segregation and widespread discrimination as well as having their citizenship revoked. Rights groups say the measures amount to apartheid.

“We see this move as a PR campaign. If the junta genuinely wants to repatriate the refugees, they already have a list of more than 800,000 refugees from past years and could have revealed their plan earlier,” Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, told Al Jazeera.