Frightened and angry Rohingya refugees yesterday forced Bangladesh to call off efforts to start sending back some of the hundreds of thousands of the stateless Muslims to Myanmar, casting fresh doubt on a disputed repatriation program.
Hundreds staged a demonstration near the border with Myanmar shouting “we will not go” on the day the first batch were due to be sent back.
More than 720,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State into Bangladesh after a military crackdown in August last year that the UN has said calls for a genocide investigation.
Photo: AFP
Many brought horrific tales of murder, rape and razed villages, and vowed never to return.
Not one of the first 150 Rohingya meant to cross back yesterday under an accord with Myanmar turned up nor wanted to return, acknowledged Bangladeshi authorities, under pressure from the UN and aid groups.
Community leaders said many on a Bangladesh repatriation list of 2,260 people had gone into hiding.
Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner went to a border transit point for the scheduled handover, but no Rohingya were present to be put on a bus across the river that marks the frontier.
At a special camp near the transit point, five buses were waiting to carry volunteers to the border.
About 1,000 Rohingya men, women and children took part in the demonstration against repatriations, shouting: “We want justice.”
“They killed two of my sons. I escaped to Bangladesh with two others. Please don’t send us back. They will kill the rest of my family. I am too old to flee the camp,” said Tajul Mulluk, 85, who is on the repatriation list.
The UN had urged Bangladesh to suspend the program, with UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Michelle Bachelet saying it would be like “throwing them back to the cycle of human rights violations that this community has been suffering for decades.”
Bangladeshi Refugee Commissioner Mohammad Abul Kalam said his team was “completely ready” to start sending back people, but stressed that the Rohingya had to be volunteers.
“If we get anyone willing to go, we will carry them to the border point with respect and dignity,” he said.
Kalam said there would be no forced repatriation and acknowledged that the UNHCR refugee agency had found no family ready to go.
“None feels safe to go back now,” Kalam said.
The mass influx of refugees joined about 300,000 Rohingya already in camps around the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar having fled earlier violence.
It has left the poor South Asian nation struggling to cope with about 1 million Rohingya facing an uncertain future in the vast camps with huge social problems.
UN agencies say they have received only a fraction of the US$1 billion-plus needed to pay for their operations for the year.
US Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday told Burmese State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi at a summit that the violence against the Rohingya was “without excuse.”
As deadline day loomed, community leaders said nearly all those on the repatriation list had fled to other camps and nearby hills.
Bachelet said many refugees were panicking at the prospect of being sent back against their will.
A confidential UNHCR document said the agency would only provide aid if returnees were allowed back to the villages they had left or to other locations chosen by them.
Amnesty International on Wednesday called the planned repatriation “reckless.”
“These women, men and children would be sent back into the Myanmar military’s grasp with no protection guarantees, to live alongside those who torched their homes and whose bullets they fled,” Amnesty’s Nicholas Bequelin said.
Human Rights Watch yesterday also called on the Bangladeshi authorities to “immediately halt” the planned repatriation.
“The Bangladesh government will be stunned to see how quickly international opinion turns against it if it starts sending unwilling Rohingya refugees back into harm’s way in Myanmar,” Human Rights Watch refugee rights director Bill Frelick said.
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