Cox’S Bazar, Bangladesh (Reuters) :
Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh were skeptical on Tuesday about their chances of ever going home to Myanmar, even though the government there has given an assurance it would accept people verified as refugees.
More than half a million Rohingya have fled from a Myanmar military crackdown in Rakhine State launched in late August that has been denounced by the United Nations as ethnic cleansing.
Myanmar denies ethnic cleansing, saying it is fighting Rohingya terrorists who have claimed attacks on the security forces. The government has said anyone verified as a refugee will be allowed to return under a process set up with Bangladesh in 1993.
Bangladesh and Myanmar agreed on Monday to work on a repatriation plan, and a Myanmar government spokesman confirmed it would go along with it, provided people could verify their status with paperwork.
But many refugees in camps in Bangladesh are scornful.
“Everything was burned, even people were burned,” said a man who identified himself as Abdullah, dismissing the chances that people would have documents to prove a right to stay in Myanmar.
At the root of the problem is the refusal by Buddhist-majority Myanmar to grant citizenship to members of a Muslim minority seen by a mostly unsympathetic, if not hostile, society as interlopers from Bangladesh.
Though Myanmar has not granted Rohingya citizenship, under the 1993 procedure, it agreed to take back people who could prove they had been Myanmar residents.
But a day after Bangladesh and Myanmar announced apparent progress, a Bangladeshi foreign ministry official appeared resigned to a difficult process.
“This is still a long procedure,” said the official, who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to media.
There were already nearly 400,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh before the latest exodus, but Myanmar had said it would only accept, “subject to verification”, those who arrived after October 2016, when a military offensive in response to Rohingya insurgent attacks sent 87,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, the Bangladeshi official said.
“We said that many Rohingya refugees have no documents, so this process should be flexible. Myanmar said they will decide who will get involved in the verification,” the official said, adding that Bangladesh wanted international agencies to be involved.
Myanmar’s government spokesman said under the 1993 pact, even a hospital record was enough to prove residency, but it was only Myanmar, not Bangladesh, that could verify citizenship. “We have a policy for the repatriation process and we will go along with that,” the spokesman, Zaw Htay, told Reuters. But even if refugees have documents, many are wary about returning without an assurance of full citizenship, which they fear could leave them vulnerable to the persecution and curbs they have endured for years.
