Latest on Rohingya Expulsion

For the moment, and likely for the foreseeable future, there’s no such thing as home for the Rohingya. For most of them, it’s not clear that there ever really was such a thing, regardless of where they were born, or how often they moved around in Myanmar.

What seems more and more certain is that they won’t return to this country. They’re not wanted, they’re not interested, they’re not able.

Repatriation was supposed to begin two days ago, under an agreement signed last November between the Bangladesh and Myanmar governments. Instead, similar meetings will probably continue, generating PR points for the negotiators but little change for the refugees.

High on the list of priorities for the Myanmar side seems to be acquittal of all blame for what’s gone on during the past five months. Not only were many Rohingya killed while fleeing, but security forces and armed Rakhine neighbors also destroyed homes, fields, and livelihood possibilities in order to prevent returns. Now the military wants outsiders to provide it the same pardon that its own official report has already given to itself.

(A precise number will likely never be known, but some estimates suggest one percent, or over 6,500, of those who ran never reached Bangladesh. That figure doesn’t count victims of rape, families whose villages were burned, or those who lost their livelihoods. The Myanmar armed forces insist they never targeted civilians.)

Return talks could also be prolonged by a seemingly limitless list of issues and actors: How would returnees’ identities be verified? Who else ought to be at the negotiating table? What can be done to make the return of any expelled Rohingya not only safe and voluntary but also sustainable?

And many questions, given unbudging public opinion here, appear to simply not be up for discussion: When might international aid groups and media, and the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, be given permission to freely visit northern Rakhine State? What will be the effect of pressure by outside bodies such as the International Criminal Court, the UN Human Rights Council, and institutions that have proposed targeting military officials or specific Myanmar industries with new economic punishments?

Finally, a few unanswerables: What if a few Rohingya militants hadn’t handed the Myanmar army an excuse to retaliate? What if the region had a better early warning system? What if after World War II the British had drawn the colonial border between what are now Myanmar and Bangladesh a little bit further east and south? What if in 2017 the world wasn't worried simultaneously about North Korea, Syria, and Yemen?

On the Bangladesh side, the complex of refugee camps housing Rohingya now qualify as the world’s largest, having doubled in size during the past six months. The exiles’ former homes in Myanmar may have been bulldozed, according to reports from the few outsiders allowed access to the areas where most of the nearly 700,000 who fled this time lived. (Some reports describe new economic zones being formed in areas that have been designated as “abandoned.” Other accounts suggest that razed villages are being replaced with government-built longhouses.)

So far, formal education isn't allowed in the Bangladesh camps. Also, Bangladeshi authorities reportedly don't want the new refugees learning the local dialect. Such decisions are justified in the same way I recall Thailand’s government denying all but essential services to Cambodian refugees during the years I worked in those camps: “If we offer them a better life than what they’re used to, they won't go back.” The English translation of that official Thai policy was "humane deterrence."