Myanmar agrees to take back 300,000 Rohingyas after successful verification

Myanmar’s military-backed government said Saturday that more than 300,000 Rohingya refugees living in camps in Bangladesh are former residents of western Rakhine state and that it will accept their return once security conditions improve.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement comes as the Rohingya refugee crisis enters its ninth year, with hundreds of thousands of refugees still living in camps in Bangladesh after fleeing Myanmar in August 2017 when the military launched a crackdown following attacks by a Rohingya insurgent group on guard posts in Rakhine, AP reports.

The operation drove more than 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh, joining hundreds of thousands of others already living there for decades in the wake of waves of previous violence perpetrated by Myanmar’s military.

The scale, organisation and ferocity of the operation led to accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide from the international community, including the UN.

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, does not recognize the Rohingya as one of the country’s 135 lawful ethnic minorities, instead referring to them as Bengalis to imply they are natives from Bangladesh and are illegally settled in Myanmar.

Myanmar said it had verified 426,545 of the 828,824 refugees on a list provided by Bangladesh as of the end of July, and determined that 308,797 of those verified were former residents of Rakhine.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said 113,507 people could not be verified and that 4,241 people were found to have been involved in what it called terrorist activities.

The statement said it will continue working with Bangladesh to receive verified former residents when the security situation in Rakhine becomes more stable.

The ministry also rejected claims that more than 1 million people were displaced from Rakhine, saying that more than 540,000 people crossed into Bangladesh after the violence in 2017 while more than 200,000 remained in northern Rakhine.

Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed to a two-year repatriation process in 2018. However, security in Myanmar worsened following an army takeover in 2021 that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, triggering widespread armed resistance. Plans to repatriate the refugees have not succeeded.

The renewed chaos brought about by fighting between the Rakhine-based ethnic Arakan Army group and the military over control of the region in 2023 forced more refugees to flee toward Bangladesh and elsewhere in a desperate move to save their lives. The Arakan Army controls much of Rakhine after capturing territory from the military in recent years.

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In recent years, poor conditions in refugee camps, steep cuts to foreign aid and the lack of safe prospects for returning to Myanmar have led to an increasing number of Rohingya refugees attempting to make the dangerous ocean crossing to Malaysia and Indonesia on rickety boats.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said in late July that Myanmar had agreed to take back 5,000 Rohingya refugees currently living in Malaysia as part of a repatriation programme.

However, an official from Myanmar’s foreign ministry, Han Win Aung, told The Associated Press at the time that the repatriation program was focused solely on verified Myanmar nationals currently held in detention centers in Malaysia and rejected reports that the government would accept Rohingya.