By IANS,
Dhaka : The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has agreed to Bangladesh reviving an old tripartite treaty under which Rohingyas, the Muslim tribal refugees from neighbouring Myanmar, can voluntarily return home.
Plans are also afoot to shift them to other countries willing to rehabilitate them.
At a press conference here Tuesday, visiting UNHCR chief António Guterres said: “Our intention is to re-establish the trilateral mechanism between Bangladesh, UNHCR and Myanmar to create a condition for voluntary repatriation of the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar.”
Around 258,000 ethnic Rohingyas from the bordering state of Rakhine in Myanmar fled to Bangladesh in 1991, following alleged atrocities against them by the military junta. They were registered as refugees by the government of Bangladesh, but without any proper legal sanction.
By 2006, around 237,000 refugees returned to Myanmar. Most of the remaining refugees live in two camps in Nayapara and Kutupalong in Cox’s Bazar, where they receive assistance from the UNHCR and World Food Programme.
A 1992 agreement among Myanmar, the UNHCR and Bangladesh allowing voluntary repatriation of Rohingya refugees has not been in force since 2006 when 92 refugees decided to return to their home in Myanmar.
Most of the refugees are still reluctant to go back to the country for fear of attacks from the military junta that rules Myanmar.
Guterres dismissed any possibility of awarding Bangladeshi citizenship to the Rohingya refugees staying in Bangladesh, The Daily Star reported Wednesday.
“Local integration is not on the table, but we will look at a number of other ways to see that they live their lives with dignity,” he said.
The two neighbours and the UNHCR will take advantage of a better “environment” for dialogue to resume the repatriation process, he added.
Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, said that the UN refugee agency is in talks with several countries that are interested to allow Rohingyas into their countries for “resettlement”.
“We don’t think the resettlement programme is sufficiently developed and we will be advocating in relation to other countries to increase the quotas of Rohingyas in the future,” Guterres said.
Canada has accepted the highest number of Rohingya refugees by far, with countries such as the US, Britain, Australia and the Scandinavian nations also high on the list. However, the number of resettled Rohingyas still remains low.