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Rights groups want ASEAN to listen to Rohingya refugees
ASEAN’s failure to help repatriate Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh this year should be a lesson that an inclusive approach would be key to handling the crisis and ensuring the refugees would voluntarily return to Myanmar, rights groups have said
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span>ASEAN’s failure to help repatriate Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh this year should be a lesson that an inclusive approach would be key to handling the crisis and ensuring the refugees would voluntarily return to Myanmar, rights groups have said.
Myanmar is currently working with ASEAN to prepare for a safe, dignified and voluntary return of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh to avoid persecution since 2017.
The Emergency Response and Assessment Team (ERAT) from the bloc’s disaster mitigation agency, the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management (AHA Center), visited Myanmar’s Rakhine state in March and wrote recommendations from a preliminary needs assessment of the refugee population in Bangladesh.
However, not a single Rohingya refugee has voluntarily returned out of fear for their safety in the conflict-torn Rakhine.
FORUM-ASIA’s East Asia and ASEAN program manager Rachel Arinii said ASEAN should therefore start to listen to the aspirations of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and other neighboring countries.
The coming ASEAN Summit that is to run from Oct. 31 to Nov. 4 in Bangkok is shaping up to be a prime opportunity to ensure the Rohingya crisis remains on top of the bloc’s priority list.
Among the multitude of meetings under the banner of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting (AMM), to be held in the beginning of the summit week, civil society organizations are to have an interface meeting with ASEAN foreign ministers on Nov. 2, according to Rachel.
“The AMM must ensure that the discussion on the Rohingya crisis becomes the main agenda item in their meetings during the summit,” she told The Jakarta Post recently.
She said the refugees in Bangladesh and other neighboring countries must be meaningfully involved in making ASEAN strategy to overcome the Rohingya crisis.
“The current ERAT report does not include the aspirations of the Rohingya community itself so the current ASEAN strategy is ineffective,” she said.
In late August, a fresh push to repatriate about 3,450 Rohingya refugees to Myanmar turned out to be a failure as no one turned up to board the five buses and 10 trucks provided by Bangladesh.
"We need a real guarantee of citizenship, security and promise for our original homelands. So we must talk with the Myanmar government about this before repatriation,” said Mohammad Islam, a Rohingya from Camp 26, one of a string of sites in southeast Bangladesh that are home to about 1 million people, AFP previously reported.
Rachel said that Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi, especially with her reappointment as Indonesia's top diplomat, should involve the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) more in shaping ASEAN’s response to the Rohingya crisis.
Indonesia’s representative to the AICHR, Yuyun Wahyuningrum said the ASEAN mechanism for responding to the Rohingya crisis really depended on Myanmar’s willingness to open itself up and therefore its genuine commitment to the repatriation process was very important.
She said without assurances over security, freedom of movement and livelihoods, the refugees would not want to go back to Rakhine.
“I hope in the coming summit the ASEAN member states will ask the Myanmar government to explain why this is not working and what ASEAN should do. So ASEAN should have a threshold that when the plan does not work, they have a guideline to do something,” she said.
The Foreign Ministry’s director general for ASEAN affairs, Jose Tavares, said Myanmar had followed up some of the recommendations from the preliminary needs assessment by the AHA Center, such as building health facilities, roads to villages and houses for the refugees.
“One of the assessment recommendations is to establish dialogue and information dissemination and I think this should be raised more,” he said.
