Rohingya deal aims to return refugees driven from Myanmar to Bangladesh ‘within two years’
The Bangladesh foreign ministry did not say when the process would begin, but it did say the return effort would consider families “as a unit”
Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to repatriate Rohingya displaced by an army crackdown within two years, Dhaka said on Tuesday, the first concrete timeline for a return of hundreds of thousands of refugees even as conditions for their homecoming remain uncertain.
The deal, hammered out in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw this week, applies to approximately 750,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar in two major outbreaks of violence since October 2016, when militants from the stateless Muslim minority first attacked border-guard posts in northern Rakhine state.
A statement by the Bangladeshi government said the agreement aims to return Rohingya “within two years from the commencement of repatriation”.
The statement did not give a date for when refugees will start returning, although Myanmar’s government has said it is on track to welcome returnees from January 23.
The deal does not cover the estimated 200,000 Rohingya refugees who were living in Bangladesh prior to October 2016, driven out by previous rounds of communal violence and military crackdowns.
The countries had finally agreed on the form refugees will need to fill out to verify their belonging in Rakhine state, where hundreds of Rohingya villages were incinerated by an extensive army ‘clearance operation’ last August.