Rohingya Crisis: Myanmar special envoy flies in today
A special envoy of Myanmar will arrive in Dhaka this evening for talks with government high-ups on the Rohingya crisis as thousands of Myanmar nationals have been entering Bangladesh since October last year to escape the continuing violence in Rakhine state.
Diplomatic sources in Dhaka told The Daily Star that Myanmar State Counsellor and leader of the National League for Democracy Aung San Suu Kyi is sending State Minister for Foreign Affairs U Kyaw Tin as the special envoy to Bangladesh on a three-day visit.
The envoy, who will lead a diplomatic delegation, is scheduled to call on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina tomorrow. He is also expected to hold meetings with Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali and Foreign Secretary Md Shahidul Haque.
In Myanmar, presidential spokesman Zaw Htay said a Myanmar government delegation would visit Bangladesh on January 11-13 to discuss the border situation.
More than 50,000 Rohingya Muslims from northwestern Myanmar have fled to Bangladesh since October last year to escape a “military counter-insurgency operation”.
In addition, Bangladesh has been hosting thousands of registered and unregistered Myanmar Rohingyas for decades.
Officials said Bangladesh will ask the Myanmar delegation to urgently address the root cause of the problem in the Rakhine state so that Rakhine Muslims need not desperately seek shelter across the border.
Foreign ministry sources said Dhaka will demand early repatriation of all Myanmar nationals and will also offer assistance to Myanmar to repatriate its nationals, whose number could be up to 500,000.
The Myanmar envoy's visit comes ahead of the meeting of the foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur on January 19. The meeting is likely to adopt a tough resolution on the Rohingya issue.
Meanwhile, a team of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) of the United Nations is now in Bangladesh to evaluate the Rohingya situation in the country.
The UN team will visit Rohingya refugees and the newly-arrived Myanmar citizens in Cox's Bazar and report back to UN for next course of action.
In another development, UN human rights envoy Yanghee Lee has reached Myanmar on a 12-day visit to probe reports of Rohingya abuse.
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