"The Myanmar government has asked people to apply for the National Verification Card (NVC). After having this card for six months, they investigate you to determine whether you get citizenship or not.

"The first question on this form is: "When did you come from Bangladesh", followed by "Why did you come" and "Who was the chairman in your village in Bangladesh?" How can we answer these questions? It means they are automatically putting us in a cage. This is why people are not willing to go back.

"If we go back, we will be forced to go through the NVC process, be forced to apply for citizenship. It's like putting your legs in the fire. You have to be able to show identity cards from both sides of your family for three generations - how can you keep ID cards for three generations? Especially when the Myanmar government asked for many documents to be returned to them in the past. We have deliberately been left with no documentation whatsoever. When they burnt the villages, what remaining documentation people had was burnt too."

This was the account of Methun, a Rohingya refugee living in the Kutupalong-Balukhali megacamp in Cox's Bazar, that was given to doctors working for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the international healthcare NGO, also known as Doctors Without Borders. Methun previously lived in Rakhine, Myanmar, working for NGOs there. Today, that life for him is a far, far cry from the present,with no prospect of work inside the camp (he is overqualified for some of the irregular work one occasionally finds) and no permit to seek one outside the sprawl of the refugee camps.

"I've been in Bangladesh since 11 September 2017 - I remember the exact date we arrived. I fled with my wife and four children. We were always threatened in Rakhine. The conditions here are inhumane. But compared to what we went through in Myanmar, Bangladesh still feels like paradise."

A problem from hell

Methun was speaking to the MSF doctors (who posted it on their blog) in early August, after having met with a delegation from Myanmar that visited the camps in Cox's Bazaar which now accommodate over 1.1 million Rohingya refugees in cramped, squalid dwellings. More than 700,000 had arrived in a matter of days starting from August 25, 2017 - the day Tatmadaw, as the Myanmarese army is known, unleashed a violent crackdown in the Myanmarese state of Rakhine, that borders Cox's Bazar.

The visit of the delegation led by the country's Permanent Secretary of Foreign Affairs Myint Thu was ostensibly meant to convey the preparation of the Myanmar government to receive the refugees back, or to pursue them to go back to their homes (what was left of them anyway), in Rakhine. And yet the signs that things still were not in place to allow any repatriation effort to begin in earnest, were in ample evidence during the two days they spent in Cox's Bazar as well. Those who have followed the fortunes of the Rohingya from near or far over decades will often come back to the pivotal moment in 1982, when a new citizenship law was passed in Myanmar that deliberately excluded almost any possibility of the Rohingya ever realizing the equal rights they were entitled to as citizens of Myanmar. In fact it relegated most of them to a status that didn't even allow them to move about freely or their children to enter the schooling system.

For all the good intentions the delegation outwardly displayed while interacting with the press or Bangladesh government officials, there was one point on which they remained steadfast: full citizenship for the stateless minority was not an option.

"Of course, according to the law, they may not be entitled to full-fledged citizenship, but they are entitled to apply for the naturalized citizenship," Myint Thu told reporters on the day of his departure, after a series of meetings with Rohingya leaders. The most they were being offered was the process explained by Methun above to his MSF doctor.

When Myanmar social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye visited the camps in April 2018, he had emphasized essentially the same condition:Rohingya refugees must go through Myanmar's NVC program as a first step before applying for citizenship. So nothing had changed. RIght from the start, the refugees have always insisted they want to return to Myanmar, but seek the guarantee of citizenship, a UN-backed safe zone in Rakhine, recognition of their ethnicity as Rohingya and return to the place from where they were driven out.

Two of those conditions in particular- guarantee of citizenship and recognition of their ethnicity as Rohingya - they hold as absolutely imperative to their return, without which they cannot muster even a minimum sense of security. Their demands are hardly unreasonable. The "most persecuted minority in the world" has never been used to asking for much.

Botched again

Of course, a number of international NGOs and other humanitarian organizations and those within the UN system, have consistently voiced their apprehensions whenever the issue of repatriation has come up till now, based on on-the-ground reports from their sources and other factors. In trying to work with Myanmar, it is as if the Bangladesh government is ready to go by blind faith: how else is one to explain their taking Myanmar's word that conditions have changed sufficiently in Rakhine to allow the Rohingya to return, when even today, all international organizations including UNHCR are banned from entering the state?

Amnesty International is just one of the organizations that harbours huge concerns about the repatriation process, not least because Rohingya refugees have yet to be consulted and included in the discussions. "As it stands, Rakhine state is not a safe place - there has been virtually no accountability for the atrocities, and the apartheid system, which stripped the Rohingya of their rights, remains in place," they said in a recent statement.

Matthew Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Fortify Rights, an NGO with a footprint across south-east Asia that has been working with the Rohingya since the start of the latest crisis, also stresses the importance of including the Rohingya in discussions regarding repatriation from the start, rather than setting dates randomly and then scrambling to find or convince potential returnees till the night before - as has happened twice now, with the same result: abject failure. Although the possibility that Myanmar intended it that way from the start can never be ruled out.

"A lot of people are talking about the Rohingya returning to Myanmar, but none of those people are Rohingya themselves. That needs to change," Smith said in a statement following the latest botched attempt at repatriation. "The Rohingya deserve a seat at the table, whether the issue is humanitarian aid, accountability and justice, return of refugees or any other issue affecting their lives. To pretend the environment is conducive for the return of the refugees is a wilful denial of the truth."

Fortify Rights has also taken the position that if Myanmar is serious about repatriation, it should also amend the 1982 Citizenship Law so that Rohingya people have full access to citizenship. They also insist that the authorities close down existing internment camps, lift restrictions on freedom of movement and cooperate with international investigators and prosecutors so those responsible could be made accountable.

"At this point, any talk of repatriation is a farce. Myanmar wants the world to believe it's done nothing wrong and that it's welcoming the Rohingya with open arms. The reality is nasty," he said. It is one that Bangladesh must also accept, and they should do so happily, rather than go along for the ride with a distinctly untrustworthy partner, at least on this particular issue.

After a period of relative quiet, the persecution faced by the Rohingya in the post-2011 period was driven by a wave of extreme anti-Muslim sentiment among the Buddhist majority. This hatred is unlikely to subside anytime soon, since it has been part of the national identity of Myanmar since the colonial period. Any immediate attempts at repatriation are thus highly unsafe. Rather than hope for the heavens to open and shower them with some unforeseen luck, Bangladesh would be better off taking stock of the situation and then working more closely with the Rohingya rather than Myanmar, towards bringing about a more sustainable and durable denouement to this unseemly problem at its doorstep. After all, who can deny the fact that past repatriations, even when largely successful, have not prevented the problem from cropping up again?

Refugee's song

Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen has taken on the issue of Rohingya repatriation like a personal challenge, one that he must overcome to prove his worth to the administration. This may blind him to the bigger picture - a refugee crisis should never be allowed to dominate the foreign policy agenda of a government. When the Rohingya issue was positioned to dominate talks during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's visit to China in July, naturally we must wonder how much diplomatic capital we expend that could've gone towards shoring up more fruitful pursuits. The way forward on the Rohingya crisis is its proper 'internationalization' (see next story) and bringing the world, including countries like the US, around to hold Myanmar accountable. The durable solution to this painful saga will entail a countermovement that springs from within the Myanmarese Buddhist community itself, when the moral imperative to stop the discrimination is recognized by the people of Myanmar themselves.

That will take time. But when it comes, we may expect it to be lasting. For now, we may return to the testimony of Methun:

"I do not anticipate being able to return within five years, so I am preparing myself to be here for longer. If we have to stay here for a long time, I would like the Rohingya to benefit from education, security, refugee status, better access to secondary healthcare, and employment.

"Ultimately, we are seeking justice. We want the right to citizenship, free movement, education, secondary healthcare, and freedom of religion, just like other groups in Myanmar. We are destroying our children's generation. Children should be in school, but there are no schools for them.

"I look at my children and other children - the future generation. If they stay five or six years here, they will be unable or unwilling to go back to school. The longer we stay here, the more children will be lost."