Case for a UN Interim Administration in Rakhine

Nearly 600,000 people crossed into Bangladesh in two months. Against that, the two governments were negotiating a repatriation plan bilaterally, and this piece argues that the format cannot deliver what it promises.

Look at what return would mean on those terms. People would be going back to the authority that drove them out, to villages that had been burned, without citizenship and with no guarantee of security. Bangladesh, poor and densely populated, was absorbing the cost in a region of hilly terrain and thin infrastructure. An agreement between the state that caused the exodus and the state carrying its consequences contains no mechanism by which return becomes safe, because neither party can supply one.

What is proposed instead is a United Nations interim administration in Rakhine, on the precedent of territories placed under transitional international authority, so that return happens under an administration the returning population has some reason to trust.

The political difficulty of that is not glossed over. The argument is that the alternatives being discussed were the appearance of solutions rather than solutions.