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Myanmar to send envoys to Rohingya camps in Bangladesh

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United Nations: Myanmar is sending a high-level delegation soon to camps in Bangladesh to explain to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims how they can return home, Myanmar’s UN ambassador said on Monday.


Some 740,000 Rohingya fled a crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017 in Rakhine state and are living in camps in Cox’s Bazar.


Many refugees have been traumatised, providing accounts of rape, mass killings and razing of villages.


Myanmar’s Ambassador Hau Do Suan told a General Assembly meeting that his government will “dispatch a high level delegation to Cox’s Bazar very soon, by the end of July, to explain to the displaced people the arrangements made for the repatriation and resettlement.”


He said some 30,000 Rohingya had requested to return, of whom about 13,200 have been verified as former residents and “can return to Rakhine anytime”.


“The only viable solution for the refugees is the safe, voluntary and dignified repatriation to Myanmar,” said UN envoy to Myanmar Christine Schraner-Burgener.


“And the key responsibility for creating conducive conditions in Rakhine lies with Myanmar.”


She said that a “first step” to addressing the Rakhine crisis would be to halt the heavy fighting with the Arakan Army (AA), a group pushing for more autonomy for the state’s ethnic Buddhists.


Meanwhile, Myanmar’s military extended a unilateral ceasefire in the country’s northern Kachin and Shan states on Monday, announcing plans to hold peace negotiations with ethnic armed groups within the next two months.


The extension follows a meeting on Sunday between the government’s National Reconciliation and Peace Centre and members of a collective of ethnic armed groups known as the Northern Alliance.


The ceasefire was originally set to run from December to April but has been extended since.


Military spokesman Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun told local news site Frontier that the successive ceasefires have allowed for the repatriation of some of the 100,000 displaced people in Kachin and Shan states. — AFP/dpa


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