By Mohammed Siraj
For almost a decade, the international community has repeatedly invoked “voluntary repatriation” as the preferred solution to the Rohingya refugee crisis. The phrase appears in United Nations briefings, ASEAN statements, negotiations between Bangladesh and Myanmar, and international donor conferences.
Yet much of this discourse rests on a deeply flawed assumption: that the Rohingya crisis is primarily a problem of displacement that can eventually be resolved through verification, transportation, reception centres, and humanitarian assistance.
That assumption collapses under serious political scrutiny.
The Rohingya were not displaced merely because armed conflict erupted in Rakhine State. Their expulsion was preceded by decades of institutional exclusion, denial of citizenship, restrictions on movement, racialized nationalism, and systematic dehumanization. The mass violence of 2017 was not an isolated breakdown of public order. It was the culmination of a much longer process through which successive Myanmar authorities denied the Rohingya recognition as legitimate members of the country.
This history explains why contemporary discussions of repatriation remain so detached from realities on the ground.
The principal obstacle to Rohingya return is not only continuing military violence or the humanitarian devastation of Rakhine State. It is the absence of a political authority capable of guaranteeing the Rohingya security, citizenship, equal rights, recognition, and protection.
Any serious discussion of repatriation must therefore confront a more fundamental question: return to whom?
A Profoundly Altered Political Landscape
This question has become unavoidable because the political geography of Rakhine State has changed dramatically, particularly since the Myanmar military’s February 2021 coup and the resumption of large-scale fighting between the junta forces and the Arakan Army in November 2023.
The military junta continues to claim sovereign authority over Myanmar, but it has lost effective control over large parts of the country. In Rakhine State, the Arakan Army has captured most townships and emerged as the dominant territorial and military force. The junta, however, retains control of its air force, naval capabilities, long-range weapons, and some strategically important positions.
Rakhine is therefore neither governed by a functioning centralized state nor secured under a stable alternative political order. It is a fragmented and heavily militarized territory in which authority, coercive power, and political legitimacy do not rest with a single institution.
This transformation has undermined the assumptions on which conventional repatriation initiatives were constructed.
Earlier international policy treated Myanmar as a unitary state that, despite its responsibility for persecution and mass atrocities, could formally receive refugees and re-establish administrative authority over them. That premise was already morally and politically questionable. Today, it is also operationally unrealistic.
The junta cannot credibly guarantee safe return to territories it no longer controls. The Arakan Army, despite exercising authority across much of Rakhine, is not an internationally recognized government and has not established a clear, legally binding framework guaranteeing Rohingya citizenship, equality, political participation, property restitution, or protection from persecution.
More seriously, Rohingya civilians living under or fleeing from AA-controlled areas have reported severe restrictions, arbitrary detention, forced labour, displacement, killings, and other abuses. These documented concerns make it impossible to assume that a transfer of territorial control from the junta to the Arakan Army automatically creates conditions suitable for Rohingya return.
No Credible Security Guarantor
The absence of a legitimate and accountable security guarantor lies at the centre of the repatriation crisis.
If Rohingya refugees were returned to AA-controlled territory, who would protect them from junta airstrikes? Myanmar’s military has repeatedly attacked civilians, villages, hospitals, schools, religious buildings, and displacement sites in territories outside its control. The Arakan Army’s control of the ground does not eliminate the danger posed by military aircraft, naval attacks, artillery, or renewed offensives.
Nor can territorial control alone protect Rohingya civilians from abuses by local authorities or armed actors.
Rohingya communities could again find themselves trapped between rival forces, exposed both to military attacks and to coercion by the authority controlling the areas in which they live. In such conditions, repatriation would not restore safety. It would relocate refugees into an active conflict zone where no institution could provide reliable protection.
A junta-led return would be equally indefensible. Much of northern Rakhine, where Rohingya communities historically lived, is no longer under effective junta administration. The military authorities cannot safely receive, resettle, reconstruct, or govern communities in territories they do not command.
The problem is therefore not merely that repatriation arrangements are incomplete. The political and institutional foundations required to implement them do not exist.
Basic questions remain unanswered:
Who would administer the villages to which Rohingya refugees return?
Who would issue identity documents and recognize citizenship?
Who would protect civilians and investigate abuses?
Who would guarantee freedom of movement?
Who would ensure access to healthcare, education, livelihoods, and public services?
Who would restore confiscated land and destroyed property?
Who would be held accountable if the guarantees collapsed after refugees returned?
Without credible answers, repatriation cannot be described as safe, dignified, voluntary, or sustainable.
Citizenship Cannot Be Replaced by Humanitarian Management
The international response has too often treated the Rohingya as a vulnerable population requiring assistance, relocation, and administrative management rather than as a people expelled through institutionalized persecution.
The Rohingya did not flee Myanmar only because they feared immediate violence. They were deprived of the legal and political conditions necessary to live as equal members of society.
Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law established an ethnically hierarchical citizenship framework based heavily on membership in officially recognized “national races.” The Rohingya were excluded from that official framework, and the law’s discriminatory application left most of them effectively stateless.
The consequences extended far beyond the denial of identity documents. Statelessness enabled restrictions on movement, marriage, education, employment, healthcare, land ownership, political participation, and family life. Administrative exclusion became a means of denying the Rohingya an equal legal and historical place in Myanmar.
The mass atrocities of 2017 were the culmination of decades of persecution, not the beginning of the crisis.
These structures have not been dismantled since the coup. Nor has the fragmentation of state power produced a more inclusive political settlement. Instead, competing armed actors are struggling to determine the territorial and political future of Rakhine State while the Rohingya remain largely excluded from decisions concerning their homeland and status.
The Uncertain Future Under Arakan Army Rule
Among Rohingya who remain in Rakhine State, particularly in areas under Arakan Army control, there is profound anxiety about what an AA-dominated political order would mean for their future.
The Arakan Army and its political wing, the United League of Arakan, have developed administrative structures and articulated an ambition for extensive autonomy. Yet they have not provided a sufficiently clear or enforceable framework explaining how the Rohingya would be incorporated as equal members of a future political order.
Questions of citizenship, ethnic recognition, representation, land restitution, freedom of movement, and accountability remain unresolved.
For the Rohingya, this ambiguity is not abstract. It creates the possibility that they may remain physically present in their homeland while continuing to exist as political outsiders—subject to authority but denied meaningful participation, rights, and recognition.
Their concern is therefore no longer limited to whether the Myanmar military can ever be trusted after decades of persecution and the atrocities of 2017. They must also ask whether any dominant political actor in Rakhine currently envisions a future in which Rohingya are accepted as equal and legitimate members of society.
Without a credible commitment to equal belonging, return loses much of its meaning. It would amount to sending refugees back to an unresolved political order in which their right to live, participate, own property, move freely, and identify themselves remains uncertain.
Return Requires Political Transformation
The Rohingya crisis is not simply a crisis of population displacement. It is a crisis of citizenship, sovereignty, ethnonationalism, accountability, and political belonging.
For that reason, repatriation remains structurally impossible under present conditions.
This does not mean that Rohingya refugees have abandoned their homeland or rejected the right of return. On the contrary, many continue to express a strong desire to return once safety, dignity, citizenship, and equal rights are guaranteed.
But return without citizenship would preserve statelessness.
Return without security would expose refugees to renewed violence.
Return without land restitution would institutionalize dispossession.
Return without freedom of movement would reproduce confinement.
Return without international monitoring and accountability would leave survivors once again at the mercy of the actors exercising coercive power over them.
A meaningful repatriation process would therefore require far more than an agreement to transport refugees across the Bangladesh–Myanmar border. It would require a political settlement that recognizes Rohingya citizenship and identity, guarantees equal rights, restores property, ensures freedom of movement, establishes independent monitoring, and creates enforceable mechanisms of accountability.
It would also require Rohingya participation in negotiations about their own future. No arrangement negotiated solely among Bangladesh, the Myanmar junta, the Arakan Army, regional governments, or international organizations can be considered legitimate if the affected community is reduced to the object of policy rather than recognized as a political actor.
International officials frequently ask when Rohingya repatriation will begin. The more honest question is whether the existing political order in Rakhine State is capable of supporting genuine return at all.
At present, it is not.
Until the structures that produced Rohingya statelessness and persecution are transformed, repatriation will remain less a pathway to justice than an illusion—one that risks transferring a vulnerable population from prolonged exile back into a territory where neither their safety nor their right to belong can be guaranteed.
Mohammed Siraj is a Rohingya multidisciplinary researcher, human rights advocate, aspiring legal scholar, and founder and president of the International Institute for Law and Politics (IILP).
