Siam Sarower Jamil,
Dhaka, April 15
Myanmar has accepted what appears to be the first five among some 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled military-led violence against the minority group, even though the U.N. says it is not yet safe for them to return home.
A government statement says five members of a family returned to western Rakhine state from a refugee camp across the border in Bangladesh.
The statement says authorities determined whether they had lived in the country and provided them with a National Verification card — a form of ID that doesn’t mean citizenship that Rohingya have been denied in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they have faced persecution for decades.
It isn’t clear if more repatriations are planned. There are concerns Rohingya would be forced to return and face unsafe conditions in Myanmar.