Clicky
National, Front Page

Tripartite talks on Rohingya Jan 19


Published : 13 Jan 2021 10:01 PM | Updated : 14 Jan 2021 01:07 AM

The tripartite talk on Rohingya repatriation between Bangladesh, Myanmar and China is going to be held in Dhaka on January 19, the foreign minister said.

“We hope that it’ll be a fruitful meeting,” Dr AK Abdul Momen said on Wednesday while talking to reporters after an event.

This will be the first such meeting in a year. The last tripartite meeting was held on January 20 last year.

Dr Momen said the meeting would be held at the secretary level.

Bangladesh is hosting over 1.1 million Rohingyas who fled ethnic cleansing in the Rakhine State. Most of them arrived after the August 2017 military crackdown.

Dhaka finds their repatriation in a safe and dignified way to Myanmar as the only solution to the crisis. Myanmar denied their citizenship.

Bangladesh has handed over a list of 840,000 Rohingyas to Myanmar for verification.

The foreign minister, however, lamented that the Myanmar side did not verify them as of today (Wednesday).

“They (Myanmar) are very slow. They verified only 42,000 people so far. There is serious lack of seriousness,” he said, adding that “we are doing our part”.

The foreign minister, earlier, hinted that the repatriation talks would begin anytime in the New Year following the completion of the Myanmar general elections. The talk was stalled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed the repatriation deal on November 23, 2017.

On January 16, 2018, Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a document on "Physical Arrangement", which was supposed to facilitate the return of Rohingyas to their homeland.

But not a single Rohingya was brought back by Myanmar following those deals.