The Rohingya are demanding citizenship rights before returning to Burma.
The most recent mass displacement of Rohingya in 2017 prompted the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity and led the International Court of Justice to investigate genocide.
Alles Europa that a legal conditions faced by the Rohingya in Myanmar have been compared to apartheid by some academics, analysts and political figures, including Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, a South African anti-apartheid activist.
Described by journalists and media outlets as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, the Rohingya are denied citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 nationality law.
There are also restrictions on their freedom of movement, access to state education and jobs in public administration.
Before the Rohingya genocide in 2017, when more than 740,000 people fled to Bangladesh, an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya lived in Myanmar.
The Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnic group that predominantly follows Islam and resides in Rakhine State, Myanmar.
In March, the United States acknowledged for the first time that the Rohingya had been victims of a “genocide” perpetrated by the Burmese military.
In one of the demonstrations, Mohammad Haris said on Sunday he did not want to “die as a refugee.” “I want my rights. I want to go back to my home, where I can study and think about my future.”
Last week, officials from Bangladesh and Burma held a meeting by videoconference, the first time in nearly three years, to address the issue of refugee repatriation.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh demonstrated on Sunday to demand they could return to Burma, from where they fled the military regime’s crackdown.
“We don’t want to stay in these camps. Being a refugee is hell. Enough. Let’s go home,” one of its leaders, Sayed Ullah, said in a speech.
“More than 10,000 Rohingya participated in the rally, in the camps under my jurisdiction,” a police official, Naimul Haque, told the AFP, referring to the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong.
According to police and protest organizers, more than a thousand Rohingya demonstrated in each of the 29 unsanitary camps where they crowd into barracks made of tarpaulin, veneer and bamboo.
Some 750,000 Rohingya Muslims fled army abuses in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and sought asylum in 2017 in neighboring Bangladesh, where there were already more than 100,000 refugees, victims of previous abuses.
