BANGKOK: Myanmar and Bangladesh will soon make a second attempt to start repatriating Rohingya Muslims, 700,000 of whom fled a security crackdown in Myanmar almost two years ago, officials from the two countries and the United Nations said Friday.
Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay, speaking in his country's capital, Naypyitaw, said the parties concerned had agreed that the process would begin next Thursday.
Bangladesh Refugee, Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Abul Kalam said the identities of the refugees have been confirmed by Myanmar and they could go back there if they want.
Speaking in Dhaka, Bangladesh's capital, he said the government had ordered local officials in Cox's Bazar district to locate those on the list in the four refugee camps there, but their repatriation would only happen if they want to return voluntarily.
He said Bangladesh is ready to provide support to any refugees who wish to return home, but also would not use force to make them go back.
Caroline Gluck, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told The Associated Press that the Bangladesh government has asked for its help in verifying 3,450 people who signed up for voluntary repatriation. She said the list was whittled down from 22,000 names that Bangladesh had sent to Myanmar for verification.
Leaders of the Rohingya refugee community in the camps said they had not been consulted on the matter and were unaware of plans for any imminent return.
Myanmar's military in August 2017 launched a counterinsurgency campaign in response to an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group. The army operation led to the Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh and accusations that security forces committed mass rapes, killings and burned thousands of homes.
The U.N.-established Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar last year recommended the prosecution of Myanmar's top military commanders on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Myanmar has rejected the report and any suggestion its forces did anything wrong.
In July, Myanmar officials went to the camps in Bangladesh to talk to the refugees about their plans and preparations to bring them back, in the latest of several similar visits. So far, most refugees appear to distrust the promises and believe it is too dangerous to return.
Gluck said it is unclear when any repatriation might begin, given the need to find and check all the individuals and the fact that there is a major holiday at the moment in Bangladesh.
It is also possible it may stall, as it did last year.
Bangladesh authorities then had arranged transportation and other facilities for their return, but the refugees protested against the move, saying they would not go back because they did not feel safe. The authorities waited for a day to find a refugee who would go back voluntarily but found none. Bangladesh then suspended the repatriation attempt.
"It's very hard to say whether people will accept voluntary repatriation this time round," Gluck said. "They tell us very clearly we want to go back with ... full rights. . They are not willing to go back if nothing on the ground has changed."
The Rohingya have long been treated as outsiders in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, even though their families have lived in the country for generations.
Nearly all Rohingya have been denied citizenship since 1982, effectively rendering them stateless, and they are denied freedom of movement and other basic rights.
Zaw Htay said at a news conference that his country's authorities had checked if the people on the list had previously lived in Myanmar and whether they had been involved in what he called "terrorism attacks," a reference to sporadic armed actions by Rohingya insurgents.
"If they are sending these 3,450 returnees back, we can accept them immediately," he said. He said Myanmar's government has proposed resettling them as a group, not separately, a plan that is controversial because it suggests they will not be returning to their own homes.
UN says 2nd attempt to return Rohingya to Myanmar planned
UN says 2nd attempt to return Rohingya to Myanmar planned
- The original list of returnees contained 22,000
- Myanmar’s military launched a counterinsurgency campaign on the Rohingya Muslims after an insurgent attack
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
