Myanmar, BD ink Rohingya return deal

YANGON: Bangladesh and Myanmar will start repatriating refugees in two months, Dhaka said, as global pressure mounts over a crisis that has forced more than half a million Rohingya to flee across the border.
The United Nations says 620,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since August and now live in squalor in the world’s largest refugee camp after a military crackdown in Myanmar that Washington said this week clearly constitutes “ethnic cleansing”. After months of wrangling, Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Dhaka’s Foreign Minister A.H. Mahmood Ali inked a deal in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw on Thursday. Dhaka said they had agreed to start returning the refugees to mainly Buddhist Myanmar in two months. It said that a working group would be set up within three weeks to agree the arrangements for the repatriation. “This is a primary step. (They) will take back (Rohingya). Now we have to start working,” Ali told reporters in Naypyidaw. Impoverished and overcrowded Bangladesh has won international praise for allowing the refugees into the country, but has imposed restrictions on their movements and said it does not want them to stay. Myanmar, meanwhile, has bristled at the growing chorus of global criticism. Aung San Suu Kyi, a one-time heroine of the human rights movement whose halo has been badly tarnished, shot back Thursday at foreign interference in what she said was a “bilateral” issue. “Western countries as well the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation had portrayed the matter as an international issue by passing resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations,” her office said in a statement.