Malaysia to return 1,500 Rohingya refugees next month, despite safety fears

First phase of Malaysia’s repatriation plan will involve Myanmar nationals who are ‘willing to return voluntarily’.

Malaysia has finalised the first phase of a voluntary repatriation programme that will see at least 1,500 eligible Myanmar refugees return home on September 29, the government said.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced in July that Myanmar’s military-backed government had agreed to take back 5,000 members of the persecuted Rohingya minority amid rising tensions with local communities in Malaysia.

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“The repatriation process will use two Myanmar naval warships and a hospital ship,” according to a Malaysia Home Ministry statement.

It said more than 4,000 individuals, primarily of ethnic Rohingya, will be channelled into the Refugee Registration Document (DPP) programme, while 5,000 others will undergo the voluntary repatriation process, as agreed with Myanmar.

There were 10,388 Myanmar nationals held at immigration detention depots by mid-August, the ministry said, with not all considered refugees.

Malaysia’s immigration department is working with the police to verify the identity, citizenship, immigration status, asylum claims and security background of those detainees by the end of the year.

Rights groups raise safety concerns

Earlier this month, the government said it would not proceed with the repatriation if the refugees’ lives would be at risk upon return.

“Malaysia, as a responsible country, will not return the 5,000 Myanmar refugees if they would either be persecuted or their lives would be threatened,” Fahmi Fadzil, the Malaysian communications minister, said.

Human Rights Watch has said conditions for a safe, dignified and voluntary return to Myanmar do not currently exist, and warned that the Myanmar military continued to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Malaysia has long been a safe haven for Rohingya fleeing persecution at home, even though it is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and does not formally recognise refugee status.

Despite that, it hosts one of Southeast Asia’s biggest refugee populations and is home to more than 215,000 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, including more than 126,000 Rohingya from Myanmar, the country’s largest refugee community.

A man from the Rohingya community walks to shore carrying an elderly woman after they arrived on a boat from Myanmar to Bangladesh, nearly three weeks after fleeing violence in Myanmar, on September 14, 2017 [Dar Yasin/AP]

August 25 marked nine years since Rohingya were forced to flee Myanmar’s Rakhine state to neighbouring Bangladesh to escape a brutal military crackdown. Today, that number stands at more than one million.

The Rohingya are a mostly Muslim ethnic group who have lived in Buddhist-majority Myanmar for centuries. However, Myanmar does not recognise them as an official ethnic group, making them the largest identified stateless community in the world.