Myanmar minister due Apr 11 to talk Rohingya list

Myanmar Minister for Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Win Myat Aye will arrive in Dhaka on April 11 to discuss on the list of Rohingya refugees that has created differences of opinion between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
After handing over the list to the Myanmar government in February, the Myanmar government blamed Bangladesh for the slow process, accusing its neighbour of submitting missing or "incomplete" information for the majority of the refugees. It also accused three on the list of being terrorists, but Bangladesh government denied.
 "To reach a common point, we need to discuss the issue openly and this time we want to share many things," a senior official of the Foreign Ministry told the Daily Observer on Wednesday. In February, Bangladesh handed over a list of more than 8,000 Rohingyas to Myanmar as it moves to kick-start their repatriation weeks after the process was halted due to lack of preparation. However, Myanmar delegation received it very cordially and apprised Bangladesh's home minister that they would start processing their repatriation. Unfortunately, they had deemed only 374 eligible for repatriation.Bangladesh reached a deal with Myanmar late last year  to repatriate nearly 700,000 Rohingyas who have fled across the border since August to escape a brutal military crackdown. More than one million Rohingya now live in squalid camps in Bangladesh's southeast and Dhaka hoped all of them would be repatriated to Myanmar.

U Myint Thu, Myanmar's permanent secretary for foreign affairs, said that of the list of thousands of returnees submitted by the Bangladesh government is improper. They blamed Bangladesh for the slow process, accusing its neighbour of submitting missing or "incomplete" information for the majority of the refugees, and accused three on the list of being terrorists. "These 374 will be the first batch of the repatriation," said Myint Thu at a press conference recently in the capital Naypidaw. He did not give a timeline for the return, but simply said: "They can come back when it's convenient for them," according to the Myanmar's newspapers. Of list of 8,000 people submitted by Bangladesh government, Myanmar deems only 374 eligible for repatriation.
The Myanmar government said the 374 repatriated refugees would be placed in the temporary housing camps they have built - which Human Rights Watch described as "open air prisons" - for no longer than a month and would then be allowed to return to either their original villages, or close by. "Mostly the Hindus are going to take the first chance of the repatriation process, however, the former Indian Foreign Secretary (Jay Shanker) visited the Rakhaine State recently," another source said. Myanmar said that they are unclear whether the 8,000 who have said they will voluntarily return are Rohingya who fled the most recent campaign of ethnic cleansing in 2017, or those who came to Bangladesh during earlier rounds of violence in 2012 and 2016. Abul Kalam, Bangladesh's refugee relief and rehabilitation commissioner, said despite the small number Myanmar had accepted, "we are still expecting them to take back all of the Rakhine population that are in Bangladesh."Kalam said he had not received confirmation from the Burmese government over the latest development, but said that in the earlier meetings between Bangladesh and Myanmar, the proposed figure that Myanmar would accept was 300 Rohingya refugees every day.
Meanwhile, the Bangladesh's Foreign Ministry did not say much in this regard. Foreign Ministry official said the Myanmar Minister will visit Cox's Bazar to see the situation on ground, but it did not elaborate. The Myanmar State Department said a delegation will also meet their government officials and humanitarian agencies to discuss efforts to improve conditions for the significant influx of Rohingyas.
However, the report published in Irrawaddy said there was a huge gap regarding the numbers of people who fled to Bangladesh between the ground survey of Rakhine State government and UN statistics.