Bangladesh’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs Md Shahriar Alam has alleged that the world has done ‘absolutely nothing’ to ensure the repatriation of displaced Rohingya refugees to their homeland in the Rakhine state of Myanmar.
“They haven’t exercised all their power yet. They have kept on investing in Myanmar. The growth of FDI [foreign direct investment] in Myanmar from 2017 to 2020 was greater than that of Bangladesh. You know, how weird that is,” the state minister questioned.
He was sceptical of proposed sanctions on the travel and finances of senior military figures, saying the people in question rarely travel, according to a report published by The Guardian on Wednesday.
Shahriar Alam told The Guardian that financial support for the Rohingya has decreased each year and there has been no real progress towards repatriation in the five years since more than 700,000 fled massacres by Myanmar’s military.
The influx of Rohingya refugees in August 2017, joined approximately 300,000 people that had already fled Myanmar because of previous security crackdowns.
The state minister said not enough pressure had been brought to bear on Myanmar’s military junta and called for greater international support for a genocide case at the UN’s international courts of justice, and for a case focusing on forced deportation at the international criminal court.