DHAKA: Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have demanded repatriation back to Myanmar as calls to return sounded within the community to mark World Refugee Day on Monday, five years after hundreds of thousands fled a brutal military crackdown in their home country.
More than 1.1 million Rohingya refugees live in dozens of cramped settlements in Cox’s Bazar, a fishing port in southeast Bangladesh with no work, poor sanitation and little access to education.
After a ban on rallies due to a massive 100,000-strong protest in August 2019, authorities allowed tens of thousands of Rohingya to stage demonstrations on Sunday, where they demanded to be repatriated back to Myanmar.
“We want to be repatriated, as long as the demands we made are met and there is a conducive environment in Rakhine,” 24-year-old refugee Osman Johar, who took part in the rallies, told Arab News.
The Rohingya at Cox’s Bazar had demanded to be recognized as official citizens in Myanmar, and for the government to stop torturing members of the community and other ethnic minorities in the country, among other demands.
“There is no security of life for us in camp at this moment. We don’t have facilities to achieve higher education. There is no proper healthcare and no freedom of movement. Above all I want to say that we are not fully safe in the camps,” Johar added.
Various crimes have taken place across the congested camps in recent years, but the killing of prominent Rohingya leader and founder of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, Mohibullah, last September, had sparked fear among the refugee community.
A community leader from the rights group, who had requested anonymity out of concern for his safety, said that refugees felt unsafe because there have been cases of kidnapping, looting and extortion in the camps in Cox’s Bazar.
“People live here in fear,” he told Arab News. “We want to return to Myanmar. But before that the Myanmar authorities should recognize our identity as Rohingya.”
A UN fact-finding mission had concluded that the 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar, which included killings and forced mass exodus of the Rohingya, had included “genocidal acts.”
Shamsud Douza Nayan, Bangladesh’s additional refugee relief and repatriation commissioner at Cox’s Bazar, said that the demonstrations on Sunday were peaceful and were joined by several thousand Rohingya.
“The Rohingya gathered in different small groups inside the camp areas demanding their earliest repatriation,” Nayan told Arab News.
While negotiations have stalled for years, Sunday’s rallies took place after officials from Bangladesh and Myanmar held a virtual meeting last week to discuss repatriation of the Rohingya, said Mainul Kabir, director-general of the Rohingya desk at Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry.
“It was very cordial, but still we don’t know when we can actually begin the repatriation process,” Kabir said.
