Malaysia has begun sending nearly 1,500 Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar, describing their return as voluntary — a word doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, since the United Nations and rights groups maintain that Myanmar remains unsafe for the people being put on the boats.
The operation got under way on Tuesday in the country’s northwest. Dozens of buses arrived under police escort at a stadium near the Lumut naval base, AFP reported, and whatever happened next happened out of sight: journalists were barred from the grounds. The passengers were expected to be processed at the stadium, then taken to the naval base, then transported to Myanmar by ship.
The roughly 1,500 people in this group constitute a first phase, according to the reporting, which implies more phases — and more ships — to come. Rights groups have criticised the returns, but their objections have not slowed the buses.
Voluntariness is the crux, and it is also the thing an outside observer currently cannot check. For a return to be genuinely voluntary, someone has to ask the returnees, in a setting where a honest answer carries no penalty, whether they actually want to go. Who did that asking here, under what conditions, and what the refugees were told about their alternatives are questions the available reporting does not answer. With reporters kept outside the stadium fence, the only account of what happened inside is the government’s own.
Malaysia has begun sending nearly 1,500 Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar, describing their return as voluntary despite warnings from the United Nations and rights groups that Myanmar remains unsafe for them.
What is documented is the machinery: the escorts, the cordoned-off stadium, the naval base, the ship. Deportation on this scale is a logistical undertaking, and by all appearances a well-organised one. Whether it is also a safe one is the question the UN and rights groups keep raising — and the one no journalist was allowed close enough to examine on Tuesday.