AFP – A Myanmar government team arrived in Bangladesh yesterday as part of a mooted pilot scheme to repatriate around 1,200 of an estimated one million Rohingya refugees.
The refugees have been stuck in camps in southeastern Bangladesh since fleeing a 2017 crackdown by the Myanmar military.
Bangladesh and Myanmar are looking to return some 1,100 people to the state of Rakhine in the coming weeks even though the Rohingya have expressed major misgivings.
The team of 14 Myanmar officials, all in civilian clothes, arrived by boat in the Bangladeshi border town of Teknaf yesterday and made no comment to reporters, an AFP journalist there said.
Bangladesh’s deputy refugee commissioner Shams ud Douza told AFP the delegates would speak to Rohingyas earmarked to be repatriated, calling the visit a “confidence-building measure”.
Twenty Rohingya visited two resettlement camps this month in Rakhine, where the Myanmar junta plans to house them in.
