Arakan News Agency
A local official in Arakan state said on Saturday that the returning Rohingya refugees would not be held in camps that were recently set up “forever” amid mounting fears about their thorny return.
“I can not ask them to stay (in the camps) forever,” said Ye Htut, who is in charge of Maungdaw province. “We have no intention of keeping them for long.”
He added that the government “will return them to their villages of origin or areas close to them.”
Ye Htut made the remarks as part of a government-sponsored press tour in Arakan state, where a military campaign in late August emptied the region of about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims.
Myanmar has repeatedly expressed its willingness to repatriate refugees who gathered across the border in Bangladesh after setting up reception centers and temporary camps for returnees.
But the Rohingya is no longer at a time when the United Nations has warned that Myanmar should make more efforts to ensure the safety of the minority targeted by a security crackdown that the international community says amounts to “ethnic cleansing.”
Human rights groups have also expressed concern over how Myanmar, which is predominantly Buddhist, is rebuilding Arakan in the absence of Rohingya with the authorities sweeping their burned villages and building new settlements and security headquarters.
An AFP correspondent saw construction work taking place in the area on Saturday, where workers put up prefabricated houses on a road to Maungdaw.
Hundreds of Rohingyas still live in a crowded camp in southern Arakan after they were displaced by violence in 2012.
On Friday, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the return of any Rohingya to their areas in Arakan, Myanmar, “may take a very long time,” adding that he was unable to “accept the idea” that their displacement would be permanent.
Myanmar and Bangladesh signed an agreement that they were supposed to begin returning in January. But Myanmar has so far agreed to receive 374 of the 8000 refugees whose names Dhaka provided as the first batch of returnees.
In one of the sites where the Rohingya was supposed to be returned, there were only three primitive houses.
The site was chosen for its proximity to the original village, which looked destroyed and burnt.
Around 100 families are expected to live in the new site, which will be completed within two months, said the official in Maungdaw Myint Kaing.
Asked why the construction was not completed, as is the case at half an hour’s time for an ethnic minority, called Mero, he said priority was given to groups that had not fled to Bangladesh.
