{"id":149045,"date":"2018-01-26T01:22:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T06:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=149045"},"modified":"2018-01-26T01:22:50","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T06:22:50","slug":"refugees-more-than-once-rohingya-fear-return-to-myanmar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/01\/26\/refugees-more-than-once-rohingya-fear-return-to-myanmar\/","title":{"rendered":"Refugees more than once, Rohingya fear return to Myanmar"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The 30-year-old Rohingya Muslim, who has been slowly rebuilding a shadow of a normal life in a sprawling and squalid refugee camp in Bangladesh, is in no mood to return home to Myanmar. (Photo<\/a> by Marco Verch\/Flickr<\/a>, CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

KUTUPALONG REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh \u2014 Mohammad Younus is a refugee for the second time.<\/p>\n

The 30-year-old Rohingya Muslim, who has been slowly rebuilding a shadow of a normal life in a sprawling and squalid refugee camp in Bangladesh, is in no mood to return home to Myanmar.<\/p>\n

After Myanmar expressed readiness to start receiving an estimated 680,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled incredible violence over the last five months, Younus said he would rather die in the camp than go back again to the land of his birth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have been killing Muslims for a long time now,\u201d he said. \u201cWe run and come to Bangladesh. Then we go back. We come back to Bangladesh, and go back again. They continue the killings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Younus first fled with his family in 1991 as a 4-year-old, when his parents joined a wave of 250,000 Rohingya escaping forced labour, religious persecution and attacks from Buddhist mobs in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state, where most Rohingya live. Three years later, the family returned home, fooled, he says, by the promises made by the U.N. refugee agency and Myanmar’s government.<\/p>\n

Sixteen years later, Younus found himself again fleeing for his life as Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist mobs unleashed a brutal retaliation after a Rohingya insurgent group attacked dozens of police posts on Aug. 25.<\/p>\n

Under heavy international criticism of what U.N. and U.S. officials labeled \u201cethnic cleansing,\u201d Myanmar signed a repatriation deal with Bangladesh to start sending the refugees back this Tuesday.<\/p>\n

According to the deal, those who return will first live in transit camps before eventually going back to their villages. But the plan has been delayed after a last-minute announcement by Bangladesh officials, who said they still have to draw up lists of refugees and complete the process of verification. They have not said how long the delay will last. They also reiterated that all returns would be voluntary.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Myanmar again promised it was ready to begin accepting the Rohingya. But the refugees say they have been on this road before.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kept going back because I still have love for my country in my heart,\u201d said Abdul Gaffar, a 50-year-old who fled spasms of violence in Myanmar in 1978, 1991, and last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey take us back saying they will give us everything, but don’t give us anything,\u201d he said. \u201cThey say they will meet our demands, but they don’t. The government cheats us after taking us back.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rohingya trace their history before modern borders were drawn, and have long lived and traded on both sides of what is now the Myanmar-Bangladesh frontier. They have also long been a persecuted minority in Myanmar.<\/p>\n

While the recent exodus of Rohingya has spawned one of the largest refugee crises in the world, smaller groups of Rohingya have been fleeing earlier waves of violence since the late 1970s. They are widely derided in Myanmar as \u201cBengalis,\u201d illegal\u00a0migrants\u00a0from Bangladesh, and have long been treated as outsiders by the Buddhist majority. In 1982, nearly all Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship rights.<\/p>\n

Even if some Rohingya are able to return home, many probably won’t recognize what they left behind. Rights groups have described how hundreds of villages across Rakhine state were set on fire after troops and mobs descended to chase out the residents. Homes and crops in the fields were reduced to ashes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey gave us back our land but didn’t rebuild our home. This is how we have been living,\u201d said Younus, recalling when he and his family returned to Myanmar in the mid-1990s. The extended family lived in a small hut that they pooled resources to build, he said, only to abandon it when the attacks started last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the massacre began this time, when they started shooting and killing everyone, they were chasing after me as well,\u201d he said. \u201cBut somehow I managed to escape and come here. So I have experienced this ordeal twice. I have been in grief all my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KUTUPALONG REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh \u2014 Mohammad Younus is a refugee for the second time. The 30-year-old Rohingya Muslim, who has …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":130752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,16,17],"tags":[335,9977,7225],"class_list":["post-149045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-immigration","category-news","category-news-w","tag-myanmar","tag-refugees","tag-rohingya","mauthors-rishabh-r-jain","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}