DHAKA: Rohingya refugees have said that their citizenship and basic rights must be guaranteed before going back to Myanmar, as the first stage of possible repatriation got underway, media reported on Monday.
About 1.2 million Rohingya people are staying in filthy camps in the coastal area of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, most of whom fled violence in Myanmar during a military crackdown against them in 2017. A team from Myanmar visited Bangladesh last week in order to verify Rohingya refugees in camps for their possible return as part of a trial repatriation plan, which has been deferred for years.
Rohingya refugees demand basic rights, citizenship
Officials were expecting as many as 400 people to be cleared to go back to their country, part of over 1,100 listed as a possible first batch of returnees. The documents of the rest of the refugees were already cleared by Myanmar officials remotely.
“I want to return to Myanmar if we are guaranteed basic rights and citizenship,” Abdur Rahman, an 18-year-old refugee in Cox’s Bazar said. According to Arab News, Myanmar does not accept the Rohingya as a native ethnic group. Most people were reduced stateless under Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law and had also been omitted from the 2014 census of the country.
Rahman told Arab News that their houses were burnt down while some of his relatives are still living in Rakhine, and he talks with them daily and they told him, the current situation in Rakhine was far better now. Rakhine, one of Myanmar’s poorest states, was at the center of violence in 2017.
However, repatriation was still undefined even with the current verification process, a Bangladesh foreign ministry official told Arab News on the conditions. The officials said that it is very difficult to specify any time frame for repatriation. It added that they can say that both sides are working to resolve the problems.
