"One million Rohingya refugees continue to live in Bangladesh, with little prospect for safe return to their homeland in western Myanmar. Forcibly displaced by years of persecution and a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign at the end of 2017, the Rohingya are understandably afraid to go home. The government of Myanmar has neither addressed the atrocities committed in the past nor improved the wretched conditions for the few hundred thousand Rohingya estimated to still be living in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. In fact, the government is pursuing policies that are causing the situation of the Rohingya to deteriorate further. This population continues to be denied citizenship and faces severe human rights abuses, heavy restrictions on their daily lives, and little access to humanitarian aid or basic services. In February and April 2019, Refugees International interviewed Rohingya who had arrived in Bangladesh from Myanmar just days before. Those interviewed described ongoing harassment, arbitrary detention, and forced labor at the hands of Myanmar’s security forces. The newly arrived refugees also reported that the security situation in the Rakhine region had recently deteriorated. In early 2019, the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic armed group from the non-Rohingya Buddhist community in Rakhine State, carried out several attacks against police stations in the region. In response, Myanmar security forces initiated a crackdown that displaced more than 20,000 people and contributed to a sense of growing insecurity in those areas to which Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh would seek to return. The long-term trendlines for the Rohingya in Rakhine show no signs of improvement. For example, more than 120,000 Rohingya have been living in displacement camps since 2012 in what the UN has described as deplorable conditions. The government’s plans to close the camps have resulted in little more than shifting the displaced to structures next to the camps with no greater degree of freedom of movement or opportunity to return to their lands of origin..."