Myanmar-UN deal on steps for Rohingya return

Myanmar and two UN agencies inked a deal on Wednesday aimed at establishing a framework for the repatriation of refugees currently crowded into Bangladeshi refugee camps.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said the deal gives them access to Rakhine state. Most of the refugees expelled amid a brutal crackdown by security forces were from Rakhine.

The United Nations resident humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar, Knut Ostby, confirmed the news on Twitter.

Security forces in Myanmar are accused of a spate of atrocities, including killing, torture, rape and the burning of homes in western Rakhine's Rohingya villages. Having fled to neighboring Bangladesh, many refugees feared their lives would be at risk when Myanmar and Bangladesh signed an agreement in November to repatriate them.

Ostby said the "framework of cooperation" agreement was an important step to resolve the crisis.

"There is a lot of work to be done. This task should not be underestimated," Ostby said. "We are talking about approximately 700,000 people who don't only have to return, but the conditions have to be right for them to return ... in terms of their identity in society, in terms of their safety and also in terms of services, livelihoods, a place to live, infrastructure."

Read more: Myanmar's Rohingya: A history of forced exoduses

However, some rights groups claimed that the past behavior of Myanmar's authorities when it came to the Rohingya people did not augur well — and could be a convenient short-term fudge to gain international goodwill.

"How will the Burmese government guarantee these people will not face again persecution?" Kyaw Win, executive director of Burma Human Rights Network, was cited as saying by the Associated Press. "It is very politically convenient for the Burmese government to sign this agreement, and also never commit."

The largely Muslim Rohingya people have been subject to decades of discrimination and often outright hostility in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. They were denied citizenship by a 1982 law that excluded them from recognition as one of Myanmar's official ethnic groups.

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