"?These are primitive people. At the end of the day they will go where they are told to go.? These were the words of a senior UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) staff member in 1993, during a meeting convened to discuss potential solutions for the 250,000 Rohingya refugees who had recently fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh. The dismissive tone of the statement was emblematic of the organisation?s engagement with the Rohingya, which for many years showed limited respect for their rights and a readiness to abandon UNHCR?s own protection principles. Drawing on previously unpublished material from the UNHCR archives, this article shows how, in both the 1970s and 1990s, large numbers of Rohingya refugees were returned to Myanmar in a manner that was premature, involuntary and unsafe. The article concludes by asking whether a similar scenario could develop in relation to the 700,000 Rohingya refugees who fled to Bangladesh in the second half of 2017..."