Rohingyas' Dignified Return to their Homeland

Everything turned on a single question: what standard of proof of prior residence in Rakhine would the two governments agree.

Myanmar had every incentive to set it high. The Rohingya, disenfranchised by the 1982 citizenship law, were unlikely to hold documents establishing residence, and those who fled left what they had in villages that were subsequently burned. An eligibility test built around documentary proof would therefore exclude most of the people it claimed to cover, while allowing the arrangement to be presented as agreed. This was written while that provision was still being negotiated.

The title carries the wider argument. Repatriation is not return. Moving people across a border without securing citizenship, security and the restitution of property does not resolve the crisis; it reconstitutes the conditions that produced it, and the same campaign becomes available to the same actors.

One further warning is recorded here and has held up: that Myanmar could simply protract the negotiations until international attention moved elsewhere.

Written for Dhaka, it went out through the Asia News Network to Singapore and Kathmandu within two days, which is the part worth noting. The closing argument was addressed to Bangladesh and the wider international community, that Myanmar was being asked to swallow a bitter pill and it fell to everyone else to see that the remedy actually reached the Rohingya. Carried by The Straits Times, it reached the governments of the region most directly implicated in how the crisis was handled, and each of them had its own reason to prefer that the question stayed bilateral.