A ground-breaking report released by Reuters today, concludes that the Myanmar government has taken deliberate steps to create conditions designed to make it “impossible” for the more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees now living in Bangladesh to return to Rakhine State.
Here are the three main takeaways:
- Hundreds of new houses are being built on the site of bulldozed Rohingya villages, many of them occupied by Buddhists from other parts of Rakhine State, according to satellite images and interviews with national and state-level government officials in charge of resettlement policy. Moreover, Myanmar security forces are also building new facilities in the area.
- The push to resettle Buddhists in the area is being headed by Buddhist nationalists who wish to “establish a Buddhist majority in the area.” However, plans to alter the population makeup of the state have been going on for decades, with previous military juntas actively pursuing construction and relocation policies to bolster the number of Buddhists in the area.
- An unpublished resettlement plan by the Myanmar government that Reuters obtained showed several dozen Rohingya-only settlement that returning Rohingya would be forced into, “segregating them from the rest of the population.”
The entire report is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand conditions on the ground for both the remaining Rohingya communities in northern Rakhine and what would be faced by repatriated Rohingya Muslims upon their return.
The most recent exodus of Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh was triggered by a military clearance operation by the military, which they say was to root out insurgents from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.
However, a July report from Southeast Asia watchdog group Fortify Rights asserted that Myanmar security forces made numerous preparations in the months leading up to the military campaign that amounted to “preparation for genocide and crimes against humanity.”
Numerous international organizations including the United Nations and the US House of Representatives have designated the violence in 2017 as “genocide” or having “genocidal intent.”
