Arakan News Agency
Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Hassan Mahmood Ali said on Saturday that the Myanmar army was changing the names of the Rohingya Muslim villages in the western province of Arakan, which would harm their return to their homes.
In a press statement in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, Ali said Myanmar’s Foreign Minister and State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi told him in an interview (not to say when) that her country’s army was changing the names of villages in Arakan.
He pointed out that this would be a problem in the process of return of Rohingya Muslims refugees in Bangladesh to their land.
“They will told us (Myanmar authorities) sorry but there is no village in Myanmar with that name,” he said.
He added that the villages originally no longer exist as they were destroyed to the ground, in reference to the magnitude of the destruction in the villages of Arakan.
The minister said that his country signed an agreement with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva to take over the operation of the Rohingya Muslims.
According to United Nations data, about 700,000 Rohingya people fled Myanmar to Bangladesh after a crackdown by security forces in Arakan State (Arakan) on 25 August 2017, which the United Nations and the United States called ethnic cleansing.
As a result of these attacks, at least 9,000 Rohingya people were killed in the same period, according to the international organization Doctors Without Borders.
On 23th November, the Government of Myanmar concluded a memorandum of understanding with Dhaka on the return of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Muslims who had fled to Bangladesh to escape abuses by Myanmar’s army and extremist Buddhist militias.
