Global New Light of Myanmar
September'2026
20.09.2026
I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The title of this report is taken from a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report of June 1995 on the repatriation of over 200,000 Burmese refugees, most of them members of the Rohingya Muslim minority, from Bangladesh to their home state of Arakan in northern Burma. The repatriation is being held up as a success story by the UNHCR in speeches of senior officials as well as in publications, including its annual report, State of the World's Refugees 1995. For the UNHCR, the return of so many refugees by early 1996, most of whom had left Burma in 1991 and 1992, was a vindication of its shift from providing refugee relief to promoting voluntary repatriation as the most durable solution to refugee problems.
But the story of the Rohingyas was not over: the cycle of exodus has not ended. On April 20, 1996, fifteen Burmese Muslims, part of a group of 150 who were seeking asylum in Bangladesh, drowned in the Naf river as they were being towed back to Burma by the Bangladesh Border Rifles, a branch of the Bangladesh army. All fifteen were women and young children. This incident brought much-needed attention to the plight of some 5,000 new asylum seekers who had entered Bangladesh since the end of February 1996. By the end of May their number had risen to an estimated 10,000. The Bangladesh government had refused UNHCR access to the new arrivals and was intent on sending them all back. Its security forces arrested 254 refugees without permitting them to apply for asylum and forcibly returned an estimated 200 others in violation of international standards.[1]
