How the Promise of Repatriation Suspends Rohingya Rights
NEW op-ed published by Frontier Myanmar.
For decades, Bangladesh has governed the Rohingya not by resolving their displacement but by managing it - keeping them contained, rightless, and endlessly temporary. Repatriation is the fiction that sustains this system. It justifies denying rights. It excuses inaction.
Always “not yet,” always “soon,” always “voluntary, safe, and dignified.” But never real. It is a political horizon that never arrives. It allows the state to defer responsibility while extracting humanitarian aid and diplomatic leverage.
In this essay, I trace how repatriation has evolved from the openly coercive operations of 1978 and the 1990s to today’s performative promise. The logic hasn’t changed. Rohingya are moved when politically convenient, abandoned when not, and ruled through a language of return that has no destination.
Camps are designed to remain “temporary.” Work is allowed only informally. Education is capped. Mobility is restricted. Waiting is not a failure of policy - it is the policy.
I lay this out in a new essay for Frontier Myanmar, tracing how repatriation has become a tool of discipline and leverage. The risk now is a symbolic repatriation - small, staged, reversible, and rights-free that lets the world look away again. Read the full piece here:
👉 Read here: https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/rohingya-repatriation-as-a-governance-tool-in-bangladesh/
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