Sheikh Hasina meets Japanese minister in Dhaka, urges international community to persuade Myanmar to take back Rohingyas

“The Rohingyas must return and for this, the global community will have to persuade Myanmar to take them back from Bangladesh,” she was quoted as saying by The Daily Star newspaper of Bangladesh.

Hasina made the call as she met Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono in Gono Bhaban here on Tuesday.

The Head of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), Filippo Grandi, on Tuesday urged government representatives and business leaders from the Asia-Pacific region to offer more support and protection for over 700,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled violence and discrimination in Myanmar’s Rakhine State over the past year.

“I urge you to consider what support your Governments could pledge in solidarity with Bangladesh until solutions are found for refugees,” he said, addressing ministers of 26 countries in Bali, Indonesia, at the Seventh Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process. “We need also to work towards comprehensive solutions for the people of Rakhine State, so that they are not forced to move in the first place,” he added.

The Bali Process is a forum made up of 48 Governments and four international organizations — including UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) — which was set up to enable dialogue and discussion on issues relating to people-smuggling, human trafficking and related cross-border crime.

In March 2016, the Bali Declaration was adopted, highlighting the need for a comprehensive collective approach to resolve statelessness, invest in inclusive development, and expand safe pathways so that refugees and migrants would have legal alternatives to putting their lives at risk while on the move.

Since late August 2017, widespread and systematic violence against Myanmar’s mainly Muslim minority Rohingya has forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes in Rakhine state for Bangladesh. Prior to that, well over 200,000 Rohingya refugees were sheltering in vast, makeshift camps in Bangladesh as a result of earlier displacements.

In his address on Tuesday, Grandi urged Governments to move “from consultation to action on the commitments they made” in the Declaration, asking them to consider how they could share Bangladesh’s refugee burden.