In April 2025, Myanmar confirmed that 180,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh were “eligible” for return. The announcement, reported by Reuters, was framed as progress in long-stalled repatriation negotiations between Myanmar and Bangladesh. On paper, the number appeared significant. In practice, it changed nothing. No large-scale return followed. No verified guarantees of citizenship were offered. No internationally monitored security arrangements were established in Rakhine State.
- The Language of Return, the Reality of Impossibility
- Diplomatic Motion Without Resolution
- Structural Blockage in Rakhine
- Justice Deferred
- Host-State Fatigue and Global Responsibility
- The Function of Endless Talks
- The Cost of Suspended Futures
- The Missing Condition: Rights
- Justice, Diplomacy, and the Risk of Normalization
- What Would Non-Waiting Policy Look Like?
- The Politics of Time
- References
The announcement did not signal movement. It signaled management.
For nearly a decade since the mass displacement of 2017, repatriation has been presented as the “primary durable solution” for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Yet every year, humanitarian plans acknowledge that conditions in Myanmar are not conducive to safe, voluntary, dignified return. This contradiction—between stated priority and admitted impossibility—has hardened into policy. The result is not accidental paralysis. It is a system of indefinite waiting.
The politics of waiting now defines the Rohingya crisis.
The Language of Return, the Reality of Impossibility
The Joint Response Plan (JRP) 2025–26 for the Rohingya humanitarian crisis describes voluntary repatriation as the preferred and primary durable solution. At the same time, it recognizes that ongoing conflict and instability in Myanmar make return unfeasible in the near term without a broader political settlement. The UNHCR Bangladesh Multi-Year Strategy 2023–2025 echoes this framing. Repatriation remains the objective. Conditions do not permit it.
This dual language has appeared consistently across humanitarian architecture. The UNHCR Annual Results Report 2024 reiterates that voluntary return remains central in principle, while acknowledging that progress is limited. The IOM Bangladesh Crisis Response Plan 2024 similarly situates the response within a protracted crisis context, where durable solutions remain constrained.
In effect, repatriation is both the solution and the impossibility.
The repetition of this formula across successive planning cycles signals a structural pattern. The system maintains rhetorical commitment to return while operating in a reality of indefinite encampment. Funding appeals are issued annually. Education, shelter, food security, and protection programming are renewed annually. Camps expand incrementally, yet remain officially temporary. The temporariness itself becomes permanent.
Waiting becomes governance.
Diplomatic Motion Without Resolution
The April 2025 confirmation of 180,000 “eligible” individuals must be read in this context. Eligibility does not equal repatriation. Verification lists have circulated before. Past attempts at organized returns have collapsed due to refugee refusal, citing insecurity and lack of rights guarantees. Reuters reporting highlights that Rohingya representatives continue to demand citizenship recognition, security guarantees, and restoration of rights prior to return.
The political framing of “eligibility” allows governments to demonstrate procedural progress without altering structural conditions. It manages international pressure. It sustains the appearance of bilateral engagement. It defers resolution.
Similarly, in August 2025, Bangladesh’s leadership warned that the country had exhausted its resources hosting nearly one million refugees and called for a “global roadmap” for return. The language of roadmaps, frameworks, and mechanisms creates diplomatic momentum. Yet none of these formulations alters the fundamental constraint acknowledged in humanitarian documents: the absence of safe conditions in Myanmar.
The Daily Star commentary in June 2025 described repatriation at a “crossroads,” noting renewed diplomatic engagement involving regional actors. The recurrence of such moments—crossroads, breakthroughs, renewed talks—has become cyclical. Each cycle raises expectations. Each ends in stalemate.
Diplomacy, in this configuration, functions less as resolution than as postponement.
Structural Blockage in Rakhine
The limits of repatriation are not merely diplomatic. They are structural.
The International Crisis Group’s June 2025 report, “Bangladesh/Myanmar: The Dangers of a Rohingya Insurgency,” situates the repatriation debate within escalating conflict dynamics in Rakhine State. Control of territory has shifted in recent years amid clashes between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army. The security environment remains volatile and fragmented. In such conditions, the prospect of safe, organized civilian return is not only diplomatically contested but operationally implausible.
Crisis Group’s earlier December 2023 report, “Crisis Mounts for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,” emphasized that refugees were no closer to returning home than in previous years. The protracted nature of displacement was already entrenched. Funding gaps were widening. Frustration was deepening.
These analyses reinforce a central point: the barrier to return is not a lack of meetings. It is the absence of rights, security, and political settlement inside Myanmar.
Repatriation talks that proceed without structural transformation risk functioning as symbolic exercises. They cannot substitute for conditions that do not exist.
Justice Deferred
Parallel to diplomatic negotiations runs another track: international accountability.
The case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleges violations of the Genocide Convention. In January 2020, the ICJ issued provisional measures ordering Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts and preserve evidence. Subsequent procedural developments have unfolded slowly. Human Rights Watch has documented updates and procedural milestones, while the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) continues evidence preservation efforts.
The legal process is deliberate by design. International adjudication is slow. But the coexistence of slow-moving justice and stalled repatriation produces a compounded temporality. Refugees wait for safe return. They wait for accountability. They wait for political transformation in their homeland. They wait for diplomatic breakthroughs.
Waiting multiplies.
In humanitarian settings, temporality is not neutral. Prolonged uncertainty reshapes social structures, education trajectories, labor participation, and intergenerational prospects. When justice processes extend over years while repatriation remains aspirational, the camps risk becoming semi-permanent spaces of suspended citizenship.
Host-State Fatigue and Global Responsibility
Bangladesh has repeatedly emphasized the burden of hosting nearly one million Rohingya refugees. The August 2025 Reuters reporting captured warnings that resources are strained and that international support must increase. Humanitarian appeals face chronic underfunding. The Joint Response Plan documents funding gaps that constrain service delivery.
Host-state fatigue is real. But fatigue does not produce return. It produces pressure.
The call for a “global roadmap” reflects recognition that bilateral talks alone are insufficient. Yet roadmaps without enforcement mechanisms or political guarantees risk replicating the same pattern: procedural movement without substantive change.
The humanitarian system, for its part, continues to operate within constraints. Education programming expands modestly. Livelihood opportunities remain limited. Legal status remains restricted. Camps remain officially temporary.
The architecture of response is designed for contingency. The crisis has become structural.
The Function of Endless Talks
What, then, is the function of endless repatriation talks?
First, they distribute responsibility. By keeping negotiations alive, states demonstrate engagement. This diffuses criticism. It signals activity to international audiences.
Second, they stabilize donor expectations. If repatriation remains on the horizon, even abstractly, humanitarian appeals can frame services as bridging measures rather than long-term integration. This preserves the fiction of temporariness.
Third, they manage refugee mobilization. The promise of eventual return can temper immediate unrest, even when progress is minimal. Crisis Group’s warning about the dangers of radicalization in conditions of protracted displacement underscores the volatility of stagnation.
None of this implies conspiracy. It reflects systemic incentives. Governments seek flexibility. Humanitarian agencies seek access. Donors seek narratives of progress. Refugees seek rights.
In the absence of structural change in Myanmar, the system defaults to managed waiting.
The Cost of Suspended Futures
The Joint Response Plan outlines urgent needs: food security, health, protection, education. These are life-sustaining. They are not life-building.
The longer displacement continues without durable solution, the more deeply social trajectories are altered. Children age into adolescence within camps. Education remains constrained. Mobility is limited. Employment pathways are restricted.
Protracted encampment risks normalizing exception. What began as emergency becomes routine. Annual funding cycles reinforce the sense of continuity.
The UNHCR strategy documents speak of resilience and inclusion within constraints. Yet without legal recognition or expanded rights frameworks, resilience risks becoming another vocabulary for endurance.
Waiting becomes inherited.
The Missing Condition: Rights
Across reporting and documentation, one consistent demand emerges from Rohingya voices: citizenship and rights guarantees prior to return. Reuters coverage of anniversary protests notes calls for safe return with citizenship recognition. Without legal status restoration in Myanmar, return is not durable.
The humanitarian architecture acknowledges voluntariness and dignity as prerequisites. International law reinforces the principle of non-refoulement and safe, voluntary repatriation.
Yet diplomatic discussions often focus on numbers—verification lists, eligibility counts—rather than rights guarantees. Quantification substitutes for transformation.
The confirmation of 180,000 eligible individuals illustrates this substitution. Eligibility without citizenship is administrative classification. It is not resolution.
Justice, Diplomacy, and the Risk of Normalization
The coexistence of ICJ proceedings and stalled repatriation presents a stark temporal contrast. Accountability mechanisms move forward incrementally. Camps persist. Talks recur.
There is a risk that protraction becomes normalization. The longer displacement continues, the more it is treated as background condition rather than urgent political crisis.
International attention cycles elsewhere. Funding competes with other global emergencies. The Rohingya crisis becomes one item in an annual portfolio of protracted situations.
Yet the structural drivers remain unaddressed: statelessness, discrimination, insecurity, political fragmentation in Rakhine.
Endless talks, absent structural change, do not bridge this gap.
What Would Non-Waiting Policy Look Like?
The sources themselves imply alternatives, even if they do not prescribe them explicitly.
Humanitarian documents emphasize voluntary, safe, dignified, sustainable return. Each adjective carries conditions: security, rights, monitoring, and access. These are measurable standards.
Crisis Group underscores the need to address underlying conflict dynamics in Rakhine. Without territorial stability and political settlement, repatriation is premature.
International legal processes at the ICJ highlight obligations under the Genocide Convention. Compliance with provisional measures is not symbolic. It is foundational.
A policy that refuses waiting would align these strands. It would prioritize rights guarantees as preconditions. It would expand international responsibility-sharing beyond rhetorical roadmaps. It would confront the structural political crisis in Myanmar rather than simulate progress through verification exercises.
Such alignment is difficult. It requires leverage. It requires sustained diplomatic pressure. It requires donor commitment beyond annual appeals.
But the alternative is continuation of managed stagnation.
The Politics of Time
Time, in this crisis, is political.
Every announcement of eligibility without return extends waiting. Every funding gap prolongs precarity. Every diplomatic cycle that resets expectations without altering conditions deepens suspension.
The Rohingya crisis is no longer defined solely by displacement. It is defined by temporality: a future deferred repeatedly.
The humanitarian system acknowledges protraction. The diplomatic system acknowledges difficulty. The legal system acknowledges gravity.
Yet the camps remain.
Waiting, in this context, is not passive. It is structured. It is reproduced through planning documents, diplomatic communiqués, and procedural milestones. It is rationalized through language of progress without outcome.
The confirmation of 180,000 eligible returnees in April 2025 was presented as forward movement. It may yet become one. But without transformation in Rakhine State, without citizenship restoration, without security guarantees, eligibility is a placeholder.
The politics of endless repatriation talks does not merely delay return. It reshapes the meaning of solution itself.
If repatriation remains the stated primary durable solution, then the absence of conditions must be treated not as inconvenience but as central political failure. Otherwise, waiting will continue to function as policy—quietly, administratively, indefinitely.
References
- Reuters. (April 4, 2025). Myanmar confirms 180,000 Rohingya refugees eligible for return, says Bangladesh.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/myanmar-confirms-180000-rohingya-refugees-eligible-return-says-bangladesh-2025-04-04/ - Reuters. (August 25, 2025). Bangladesh exhausts resources on Rohingya refugees, chief adviser warns.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladesh-exhausts-resources-rohingya-refugees-chief-adviser-yunus-warns-2025-08-25/ - AP News. (2025). Coverage on Rohingya anniversary protests and demands for safe return and citizenship.
https://apnews.com/article/b30f40eb3dda5c45a7b7fe8aa7e64cfe - The Daily Star. (June 29, 2025). Rohingya repatriation at a crossroads.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/views/open-dialogue/news/rohingya-repatriation-crossroads-3927781 - Joint Response Plan (JRP) 2025–2026.
https://rohingyaresponse.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/JRP-2025-26.pdf - UNHCR. Bangladesh Strategy 2023–2025.
https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/2025-01/Bangladesh%20-%20Strategy%202023%20%E2%80%93%202025_0.pdf - UNHCR. (2024). Bangladesh Annual Results Report 2024.
https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/bangladesh_arr_2024.pdf - IOM. (2024). Bangladesh Crisis Response Plan 2024.
https://crisisresponse.iom.int/response/bangladesh-crisis-response-plan-2024 - International Crisis Group. (June 18, 2025). Bangladesh/Myanmar: The Dangers of a Rohingya Insurgency.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar-bangladesh/348-bangladeshmyanmar-dangers-rohingya-insurgency - International Crisis Group. (December 6, 2023). Crisis Mounts for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/asia/south-asia/bangladesh/355-crisis-mounts-rohingya-refugees-bangladesh - International Court of Justice. The Gambia v. Myanmar (Application of the Genocide Convention).
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/178 - International Court of Justice. (January 23, 2020). Order on Provisional Measures.
https://www.icj-cij.org/node/105890 - Human Rights Watch. (February 14, 2022). Developments in The Gambia’s Case Against Myanmar at the ICJ.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/02/14/developments-gambias-case-against-myanmar-international-court-justice - Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM). ICJ Timeline Updates.
https://iimm.un.org/en/icj-gambia-v-myanmar
