The plight of the Rohingya is likely to cast a long shadow over the upcoming ASEAN Summit in Thailand this week, as regional leaders are urged not to become complicit in what rights groups call a proposal for forced or premature repatriation.

Human rights activists and groups lambasted the 10-nation bloc on Wednesday for the failure to address in a commissioned report the root causes of the Rohingya conflict, which has driven hundreds of thousands of people from the Muslim minority into neighboring Bangladesh.

ASEAN leaders including Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi are expected to meet this weekend for the 34th ASEAN Summit in Bangkok, during which the Rohingya refugee crisis is expected to be raised as a topic of main concern.

During the last summit in November, ASEAN leaders instructed its humanitarian assistance and disaster response agency, the AHA Center, to assist Buddhist-majority Myanmar in efforts to repatriate the mostly Muslim refugees.

From that directive emerged a needs assessment report, leaked to the media earlier this month, which critics have attacked for the regional organization’s failure to acknowledge Myanmar military atrocities and the ongoing human rights abuses against the Rohingya.

In a follow-up to the report, ASEAN and the Myanmar government agreed to pursue “low-hanging fruit” such as to have a training program to support the repatriation process once it commences, and to establish a technical working group to look at ways to implement the report’s recommendations.

“ASEAN needs to stop turning a blind eye to Myanmar’s atrocities against the Rohingya, and cease lending legitimacy to the repatriation process. We all know the Rohingya population in Bangladesh and elsewhere won’t be returning home voluntarily until the situation on the ground in Rakhine State dramatically alters,” said Indonesian lawmaker Eva Sundari, a board member of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) in a statement to The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

As the international community observes World Refugee Day on June 20, the Rakhine humanitarian crisis — a watered-down moniker used within ASEAN to appease Myanmar —remains one of the world’s largest refugee crises, with more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing persecution that escalated following a military crackdown in Rakhine state in 2017.

The APHR, alongside the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) and the Progressive Voice group, urged ASEAN to take meaningful steps toward the promotion and protection of the rights of the Rohingya community, including through acknowledging their identity and citizenship status and by ensuring participation in decisions that concern them.

The Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organization Malaysia (MERHROM) president, Zafar Ahmad Bin Abdul Ghani, said no positive changes had been made in the situation in Rakhine state since ASEAN leaders agreed on the need to find a comprehensive and durable solution to address the root causes of the conflict in the last summit. “The Rohingya continue to be victimized especially after the fight between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army,” he said in a statement.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has said that almost 1 million Rohingya refugees living in camps across Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh remain vulnerable to serious health risks.

Refugees reside in overcrowded, tight spaces and are exposed to flooding and landslides during the rainy season. Many people lack access to clean water, sanitation, health care and shelter and outbreaks of multiple vaccine-preventable diseases have sprung up among the population.

“A lot of people would like to go home, but that’s not possible. So, they feel hopeless,” MSF medical coordinator Jessica Patti told the Post.

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