The Emergency Response and Assessment Team (ERAT) from the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Center) visited Rakhine state in March and recently concluded its preliminary needs assessment on Rohingya refugees.

The AHA Center, whose main responsibility is disaster mitigation, was given the mandate by ASEAN leaders to assist Myanmar in efforts to repatriate more than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled the country to neighboring Bangladesh back to Rakhine state in Myanmar.

Jose Tavares, the Foreign Ministry’s director general for ASEAN affairs, cited the AHA Center report on needs assessment, which states that the team identified several potential areas of cooperation, including efforts to up the capacity at reception and transit centers. The agency also prepared a step-by-step process outlining how refugees could return to their homeland.

“According to the report, one reception center can process 150 people per day. It means that if there are two reception centers, it [the whole process] would take a very long time. They estimated that with two reception centers, it would take almost six years to process 500,000 refugees,” Jose told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

The assessment report was sent to each ASEAN member state for review.

According to Jose, ASEAN members have yet to agree on what kind of model would be best for member states to help in the repatriation process via the AHA Center since the ASEAN mandate to the agency was only to conduct a preliminary assessment to establish a receiving center and a transit place.

“We will need to again discuss how to help, whether doing it bilaterally or collectively as ASEAN,” he said, adding that a meeting of ASEAN senior officials would be held in the coming weeks to discuss the AHA Center report.

ASEAN leaders are also scheduled to meet at a bloc summit from June 20 to 23 in Bangkok, where they are expected to discuss the Rohingya crisis.

Rachel Arinii, program manager of Forum-Asia, a consortium of civil society groups from 19 Asian countries, said it was important to prevent the repatriation process from being used as a tool to perpetuate systemic violence and discrimination against the Rohingya community.

She feared that ASEAN would use approaches laid out in Senior Official Meeting on Transnational Crime (SOMTC) documents — which would be “dangerous” because the Rohingya crisis was not a security crisis or terrorism but rather a crisis involving rights violations due to systematic efforts to suppress the social, political and economic rights of the Rohingya.

She also warned about the possibility of forced repatriation due to the absence of the involvement of the Rohingya community in the process, citing the lack of progress of the previous efforts between the the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Myanmar under an agreement on refugees.

“In the end, it could mean it’s a legalized forced repatriation,” she said.

In its report, the AHA Center also suggested that there should be an informal engagement involving the Rohingya refugees, according to Jose.

“This is the only way. If [the refugees] want an UN-facilitated repatriation. That is just not possible for the time being. What we have now is a repatriation prepared bilaterally between Myanmar and Bangladesh and assisted by ASEAN through the AHA Center,” he said.

Meanwhile, UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi urged Myanmar on Friday to “show results” to convince Rohingya refugees to return, AFP reported.

“My message is: ‘please accelerate’, because it has been very slow in the implementation in this first year. We need to show results,” he said on Friday as reported by AFP after visiting the region and meeting officials in Naypyidaw, including civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

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