"A month after the prime minister of Bangladesh raised concerns about the possibility of Rohingya repatriation, UNHCR representatives in Myanmar met with the junta’s education minister on February 7 to discuss repatriation. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi officials are reluctant to act in any way that might be perceived as taking sides between the junta and the ethnic Arakan Army; Bangladesh has perhaps started to understand there is a new sheriff in Rakhine, just across the Naf River. But what do AA victories mean for the Rohingya repatriation promoted by the UNHCR and the governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh? Our answer is that after 45 years of persecution of the Rohingya: Not much. The Rohingya also know that safety conditions have actually become worse in Rakhine since they fled. The million stateless Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar is still one of the world’s most intractable refugee situations. Their Myanmar homeland insists they are foreigners from Bangladesh; their Bangladeshi hosts insist that they belong in the land of their birth, Myanmar. The rebellious AA insist that they can be part of a new Rakhine, but only if they meet AA conditions, and not as equals. And to top it off, the junta’s military has started to conscript the few Rohingya still in Myanmar to fight against the AA. Humanitarians from the UN, meanwhile, have tired of an impoverished population that has poor English, few urban skills, and is easily dismissed as different and even primitive. Thus, even as hundreds of Rohingya are drowning at sea, the border post to Bangladesh has been captured by AA forces, and Sittwe itself may come under siege, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the UNHCR avoid the subject of resettlement in third countries, claiming simply that “Rohingya refugees require sustained, predictable and adequate financial support to live safely and decently, and to prepare for a sustainable return.” This would perhaps be promising, except that of course the voluntary repatriation policy was tried before, beginning in 1978, the first time UNHCR became involved in a Rohingya refugee movement. The Tatmadaw has repeatedly expelled the Rohingya as a way to reinforce Burmanization policies adopted after the military coup in 1962. Persecuted by Tatmadaw; viewed as primitive by global community? For centuries, Rohingyas lived in Rakhine, predating the British East India Company in 1824, and more were brought in by British colonizers to farm between 1824 and 1938. Many were Muslim but engaged in a range of religious practices also seen in neighboring British Bengal. In 1962, the hyper-nationalist Burmese Buddhist forces of the Ne Win regime seized control, and defined the Rohingya as ineligible for citizenship unless they could prove their ancestors were in Rakhine before the 1824 British conquest. General Ne Win’s military insisted that the Rohingya were foreign citizens and initiated mass deportation of 200,000 in 1978. A quick repatriation occurred with the help of UNHCR. Most were pushed back to Myanmar after an experienced UN observer remarked that the lack of food and basic sanitation in the camps led to them becoming “death traps.” A similar episode happened in 1990 when the military deported 250,000 Rohingya, using Islamophobia to divert attention of the ethnic Bamar from the developments of 1988 pro-democracy movements. And just as in 1978, a quick repatriation was arranged with UNHCR help. History repeated in 2012 when Rakhine was again cleared of Rohingya. The repatriation back to Myanmar was not as aggressive but the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar just grew larger. Then finally in 2017, the greatest expulsion of all was undertaken by the Burmese military, and perhaps another 800,000 Rohingya fled after the Tatmadaw burned villages, committed massacres, and ethnically cleansed Rakhine of its Rohingya population. And still, now seven years later, the international response is ambivalent, even as some 30,000 Rohingya babies are born each year, and hundreds of thousands of young children grow up in refugee camps where radicalization is a predictable by-product. Trapped by righteousness of historical narratives The Rohingya ultimately are trapped between competing and complex historical narratives. Myanmar’s nationalist Burmanization narrative continues to insist that the Myanmar people are defined by government-determined nationalities called Taingyingtha, which are considered sub-groups of the dominant Burmese Buddhist majority. By such definitions, Rohingya were foreigners and intruders from British Bengal; righteousness by this logic demands that they return to its successor state, Bangladesh. And of course, Bangladesh’s own citizenship definition excludes Rohingya because the British in 1824 classified Rohingya as Burmese. To complicate matters further, the Buddhists of Rakhine themselves are in revolt against the Burmese military and have occupied border posts between Myanmar and Bangladesh. The AA’s General Twan Mrat Naing recently told the BBC that, if “Rohingyas or Bengalis or Chittagonian Muslims” would like to enjoy the benefits of equal treatment under [Arakan] law, they must get along with other ethnic groups and abandon contesting “doctored” historical narratives and claims of Rohingyas. In other words, ethnic Rakhine communities, which root their own identity in historical claims of Buddhist Arakan dominance, have attitudes toward the Rohingya that are similar to the heirs of the Konbaung Kingdom ruling from modern Naypyitaw. For all that, nobody has seriously asked the Rohingya where they fit in a future Myanmar or Rakhine. As a result, the million Rohingya are trapped in Cox’s Bazar as wards of the international humanitarian regime represented by the UNHCR. There they are accused of being freeloaders in the international humanitarian system which created the camps in the first place. There they have been repeatedly excluded from their rights as refugees. Jeff Crisp, formerly of the UNHCR, described the Rohingya as being among the most disadvantaged refugees not only because they are caught between Burma and Bangladesh, but because the Rohingya were assumed by the UNHCR to be primitive, and repatriation to Myanmar considered the only solution. They were excluded from the mass resettlement assistance successfully extended to Indochinese, Yugoslavians, Ukrainians, Europeans and millions of others who moved beyond refugee camps while retaining their right to eventually return. And then there is the demography problem… In short, the Rohingya refugee problem cannot be resolved through wishful thinking of the UNHCR, Myanmar or Bangladesh governments about mass repatriation. About 30,000 Rohingya have been born every year in the camps since 2017, a rate that will accelerate soon. Indeed, a 2022 survey showed that 22% of the refugees were under 5 years old, which means they were mostly born in the camps after 2018. Doing nothing is to court a long-term disaster, from the radicalization of the young population, or perhaps a Bay of Bengal typhoon. What this means is that there are now over 1 million Rohingya trapped in the camps. Without resettlement policies, the number will begin doubling every 20 years or so, meaning 1 million will become 2 million. The basic demographic reality is that the population will be young, energetic, and excluded. The question is only what their energies will be turned toward: engagement with the modern world, or rebellion and dreams of violent return. Looking forward: Resolution of refugee problems But the Rohingya situation is not the first seemingly intractable refugee crisis. Indeed, probably the most intractable is the Palestinian refugee crisis which has festered in the Middle East since 1948, and which despite the successful resettlement of millions of Palestinians across the Middle East (2 million in Jordan alone), continues to produce explosions, even in 2024. It is well beyond this article to suggest solutions for the Palestinian refugee situation, except to note that the Palestinian situation is a warning of how badly things can go wrong when there is too much wishful thinking about quick repatriation. But not all refugee situations turn into the Palestinian situation in Gaza. Also relevant for Rohingya refugees is how the Indochinese refugee situation was resolved after perhaps 3 million fled between 1975 and 1990. Perhaps 250,000 died at sea, but the remainder made it to neighboring countries, especially Thailand, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines. There they were housed in camps like those in Cox’s Bazar today. There was also of course great hope that “all” would return to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. But most did not. The largest numbers are in the United States, China, and in the case of Cambodians, in Vietnam. More such refugees and their descendants are still in Thailand. Similarly, the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s saw millions resettled in Europe. Decades earlier, 10 million European refugees from World War II were dispersed across Europe, North America and, in the case of the survivors of the Holocaust, to Israel. Following the Bangladesh Revolution in 1972, India and Bangladesh cooperated to resettle 10 million refugees back in Bangladesh – an exception to the general rule that a good proportion of refugees end up resettled outside the home country. Indeed, the current president of Bangladesh, Sheikha Hasina, was herself a refugee in the 1980s. Unresolved refugee crises today also include the millions of Syrians who are hosted mostly in the Middle East or Germany, Ukrainians who have taken sanctuary in European countries, and Venezuelans who are being hosted in Colombia, Ecuador, and other neighboring countries. Refugee problems require regional solutions All this is a way of saying that the Rohingya situation does not need to end up like Gaza, and will not if there is a concerted international effort to address the needs of the Rohingya from a regional perspective, just like was done with the former Yugoslavians, Europeans, and Ukrainians. Myanmar’s war-torn zones are likely to remain unsettled, and in the short term will offer little potential for refugee return – in fact, a premature return to AA territory is likely to victimize the Rohingya further. The mid-term solution is of course to integrate Rohingya into the burgeoning cities of South and Southeast Asia, where there are labor shortages. Indeed, this is happening with Venezuelans in Colombia and Ecuador; Ukrainians in Europe; and Syrians in Turkey and the Middle East. This does not mean that the refugees give up their right to return to a homeland. But spreading responsibility means that the generosity of single hosts is not stretched, and radicalized refugee groups seeking violent return are less likely to develop. Prospects for the Rohingya to return to Myanmar in future can be retained, despite the current uncertainty over when a peaceful return may be possible. And indeed the Rohingya will be the best to judge this. The frustrating aspect, from the perspective of the existing nation-state system, is that such a regional solution implies letting the Tatmadaw get away with atrocities, at least in the short term. It also runs the risk of incentivizing further bad behavior by the Tatmadaw or perhaps even the AA. This is a puzzle for the regional and international actors to ponder. But, to reduce the risk of catastrophe, the UNHCR, ASEAN, and nearby countries need to be more willing to share the burden of hosting Rohingya refugees, which currently falls primarily on Bangladesh, albeit reluctantly. Tony Waters is a Visiting Professor at Leuphana University, Germany, and formerly at Payap University Chiang Mai. R.J. Aung (a pseudonym) is a former peace and development worker in Yangon and Thailand, and a native of Yangon..."