Press release
18 March 2023
The Arakan Rohingya National Alliance (ARNA) has stated that going back home to Arakan from Bangladesh and elsewhere remains the top priority for the Rohingya people. In the last few decades, the Rohingya have faced mass atrocities, including genocide committed by the Myanmar armed forces.
Especially the brutal genocidal campaign of 2017 carried out against innocent Rohingya resulted in the deaths of approximately 25,000 people, rapes and sexual violence against Rohingya Muslim women, acts of terror against children where many were seized from their mother’s laps and thrown into the fire had caused an exodus of terror of more than a million people to the safe abode of neighbouring Bangladesh.
For opening borders and allowing us in this hour of need, ARNA expresses its gratitude to the government and people of Bangladesh. We understand that it remains a heavy burden for Bangladesh to host such a large number of refugees, but despite that Bangladesh has done so for humanitarian reasons at a time the Rohingya community has nowhere else to go.
Refugee life is never desirable anywhere in the world and as a representative organisation of the Rohingya community, we naturally want that refugees in Bangladesh, where the vast majority of Rohingyas are based, should go home. But in the last five years since the terror exodus, the Myanmar military regime has repeatedly refused to recognise Rohingyas as citizens of the nation. Reportedly, a delegation of the Myanmar military regime has recently arrived in Bangladesh with measures to take back the refugees, a delegation of the same military that has had carried out the most brutal genocide of the 21st century.
The delegation represents an illegitimate military regime in Myanmar guilty of genocide, a regime that has no control over vast swathes of the country’s territory, which are controlled by myriad armed ethnic groups many of them directly in conflict with the unrecognised Junta. This includes our homeland of Arakan, where the regime has scant control. So, we have no idea how and where the delegation plans to settle the refugees.
There is no improvement in the human rights situation of Rohingya in Arakan/Rakhine State. The remaining Rohingya in Arakan are still living under the threat of genocide in confined villages, ghettos and apartheid like concentration camps where living conditions have been described as worst in the world. It is unfortunate that the rightful demands of the refugees – for full citizenship and ethnic rights as an indigenous people of Myanmar — have been totally ignored.
The primary motive for Myanmar apparently taking back this token number of refugees is crystal clear — the deadline for Myanmar’s counterargument in the Gambia filed genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is drawing near, April 24 to be precise. Taking back a few refugees, even if it is less than one percent of the population, shall allow Myanmar to come up with a counterargument under the very false pretence they are sincere about the return of refugees. Put simply, the regime will have their day in court and will try to make a mockery of the diligent efforts of the OIC, Gambia and even Bangladesh, not to mention the hapless Rohingya, for whom this measure, another reflection of Myanmar’s cunning diplomacy will only delay the day they can safely return to their homeland in North Arakan.
Also the head of the Junta, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has declared elections to be held in August 2023 in an attempt to gain some degree of much needed legitimacy. The problem is with the country in civil war and the vast majority of people in active opposition to the military regime, and political stakeholders driven to armed resistance, the elections lack credibility, mildly speaking. So precarious is the status of the elections that even the Junta does not know whether they should or would actually go ahead.
However, taking back a few hundred Rohingya refugees, might have a very little effect on tilting the balance in favour of the elections. Such an endeavour taken few months ahead of this so-called election however risks finishing off any future attempts of repatriation and in the long run it will make it much harder for us to go back to our homeland and live in peaceful co-existence with the other ethnic groups of Myanmar, something which we have dreamt of for so long. There can be little doubt that our fellow ethnic groups of Myanmar, and even the Burman majority whole heartedly rejects the election and once again, as so many times in the past, the Rohingya community risks ending up on the wrong side of the hearts and minds of the nation, a strategy that has favoured no one else but the military forces of Myanmar and their allies in the Buddhist nationalist movement.
