The Foreign Minister's recent appeal to foreign diplomats for assistance in the repatriation process of the Rohingya refugees was interesting. He sought third-party assistance for repatriation of the 7,50,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh. But in the China-brokered "Agreement on Return of Displaced Person from Rakhine State" that he had signed with the Myanmar Government on November 23, both sides had agreed to deal with the repatriation bilaterally without any third-party involvement. The Foreign Minister's appeal was made soon after the Foreign Secretary had signed a follow-up deal of November 23 to start the repatriation immediately.
Thus, his appeal suggested that Bangladesh was not confident that Rohingya repatriation could be handled bilaterally under the November 23 deal. Such fears also came from important international quarters and human rights groups. The UN Secretary-General António Guterreshad said immediately after the final deal to start the repatriation that it did not clarify whether the refugees would be allowed to return to their homes or taken from camps in Bangladesh to camps in Myanmar. He was also critical that the November 23 deal and its two follow-ups did not keep any scope for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that would make it difficult to "guarantee that the operation abides by international standards."
Paul Ronalds, Chief Executive Officer of Save the Children, was more specific in stating that the bilateral deal would not help the Rohingya repatriation process because it does not address the key issues of "citizenship, freedom of movement inside Myanmar and unimpeded access to jobs".
While speaking with foreign journalists, Rohingyas in the refugee camps also have shown little inclination to go back as they feared death waited them upon return.
The Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has played a major role in putting Myanmar on the dock over its treatment of the Rohingyas after the latest brutality on them began following the death of four Myanmar soldiers in the terrorist attack by the Arakan Revolution Salvation Army on August 25 last year. She called such treatment by the Myanmar military, genocide, an accusation with which many international leaders, including the President of France, agreed. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called the action of the Myanmar military that caused the huge influx of Rohingyas into Bangladesh a "textbook case of ethnic cleansing." The US agreed with the conclusion and President Trump threatened tough economic sanctions against Myanmar for these crimes.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister was let down by the country's best friends -- India, China and Russia. Neighbours such as Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka, along with the ASEAN members, also backed the perpetrators of genocide. The Foreign Ministry also failed to be proactive. It failed to send special envoys to New Delhi, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and in the neighbourhood to Colombo, Thimpu and Katmandu to encourage them to stand with Bangladesh that was burdened with nearly a million refugees that had fled genocide/ethnic cleansing in the hands of the Myanmar military. If ever in its diplomatic history Bangladesh needed to send special envoys for a grave national cause, it was for the Rohingya cause.
Instead, Bangladesh allowed China to broker the November 23 bilateral deal which let Myanmar off the hook and left Bangladesh with the refugees with very little help from the international community. If that was not bad enough, the deal had some very serious drawbacks and weaknesses that Bangladesh had overlooked while signing it.
The most important of these drawbacks and weaknesses was the fact that Bangladesh succumbed to Myanmar's demand that the Rohingyas cannot be referred to as Rohingyas. Instead, Bangladesh agreed with the Myanmar formulation to call the Rohingyas as "Displaced Persons" from the Rakhine state in the deal. Myanmar may use this formulation to establish the most dangerous of its historically untrue narratives in the deal, that the Rohingyas are not original inhabitants of the Rakhine state and that they came from the neighbouring country, pointing a finger at Bangladesh.
The historical fact is quite the opposite. The Rohingyas have been living in what is now the Rakhine state, formerly known as the Arakan, for over a thousand years. They are the original inhabitants of the Rakhine state for many hundreds of years when it was a part of the Indian Empire of the Mughals before the British occupied India. In fact, it was only in 1784 that the Barmars, the ruling ethnic group then and now, had for the first time annexed the Arakan to bring it under Burmese rule.
Just before Myanmar became independent as Burma from the British in 1948, the large number of ethnic groups of Burma were listed for the purpose of incorporating their ethnic identities into Burmese citizenship. The Rohingyas were one among 130-plus ethnic groups of Burma at the time of its independence who were assured legally to become citizens of Burma upon independence. In 1982, under the Myanmar Citizenship Law, the Rohingyas were taken off that list and were made illegal immigrants and in essence "stateless" -- a calculated step of the Myanmar military to eventually drive them out of the country.
The Myanmar military encouraged the majority Buddhists to commit brutal crimes against the Rohingyas on a regular basis. In 1978 and 1992, such brutalities of the Myanmar military had brought to Bangladesh quarter million Rohingyas each time.
The November 23 deal and its follow-up deals allowed Myanmar not just to come out of a very tricky situation from being internationally identified as a pariah nation and punished as a perpetrator of genocide/ethnic cleansing but also establish its false historical narratives to deny the Rohingyas their legal rights as inhabitants of the Arakan region or the present Rakhine state for over a thousand years.
In the process, the issues of "citizenship, freedom of movement inside Myanmar and unimpeded access to jobs" for the Rohingyas that Paul Ronalds of the Save the Children Australia had rightly stated as crucial to the resolution of the Rohingya crisis have receded further into the distant horizon. The Rohingya refugees and Bangladesh should better prepare themselves for a long tryst with the tragedy. In the midst of all these, the Foreign Minister's appeal to the diplomats is likely to fall on deaf ears.
The writer is a former Ambassador. [email protected]
