‘UN deal with Myanmar could return Rohingya Muslims to killing fields’

The UN Development Program (UNDP) on Wednesday signed an agreement with the Myanmarese government to return some of the 700,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled persecution in their villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine State and who are now living in crowded makeshift camps in Bangladesh.

The deal has, however, disconcerted the refugees, who say they won’t return unless they are given safety guarantees and citizenship by the Myanmarese government, according to the Associated Press.

Though the Muslim community has lived in Myanmar for generations, its members are denied citizenship by the government in Naypyidaw, which persistently describes them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, where they are also denied citizenship.

In the deal between the UN and Myanmar, the Muslims have not been referred to by their common name — the Rohingya. Instead, they have been referred to merely as “displaced persons,” potentially indicating that the UN has adopted the Myanmarese government position.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims were killed, arbitrarily arrested, or raped by Myanmarese soldiers and Buddhist mobs mainly between November 2016 and August 2017, when many of the surviving members started fleeing to Bangladesh en masse.
In their absence, the government has bulldozed their villages, built new housing structures, and shuttled Buddhist citizens from elsewhere in the country to populate the area.

The UN has described the campaign as a textbook example of “ethnic cleansing” and possibly “genocide.”

The refugees now demand a UN security force to guarantee their safe return to their villages, according to a Saturday piece on the Anadolu news agency by experts, who described the new agreement as inadequate.

Experts Maung Zarni and Natalie Brinham warned the UN that sending the Rohingya back home “could potentially result in another round of mass killings, further decades of containment in concentration camps or deliberate slow starvation,” — all of which have happened to the Muslims in the past.

They argued that the refugees remained “largely unpersuaded” by the repatriation deal because it did not guarantee their safe return.

“The conditions on the ground indicate no semblance of physical safety for any returning Rohingyas,” they wrote.

They said “there is little prospect for their reintegration into the predominantly Buddhist society,” adding that “the frightening prospects of being marched back to Myanmar’s ‘killing fields,’ has unnerved Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.”

UN officials, however, said the agreement was an important first step. They said it would create a “framework of cooperation” designed to create conditions for the “voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable” repatriation of the Rohingya.

A recent report by the humanitarian group, Doctors without Borders, said at least 9,400 Rohingyas were killed in Rakhine from August 25 to September 24 last year. It  revealed that the deaths of 71.7 percent or 6,700 Rohingyas were caused by violence.
That figure included 730 children below the age of 5, according to Doctors without Borders.