Will Myanmar's Rohingya Return?

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Myanmar’s government wants Rohingya refugees to return, but can it guarantee their safety and way of life? Jonathan Head takes a rare trip to Rakhine state to see the government’s resettlement plans.

In Assam state in India, another migrant crisis is on the rise, following a drive to identify and deport illegal immigrants. This has left nearly 2 million people without Indian citizenship. Rajini Vaidyanathan meets some of the people now left stateless.

Spain’s northern Basque region has been largely at peace thanks to the end of a four-decade campaign of violence by the separatist group Eta. Guy Hedgecoe reports from a small town where a rowdy bar fight aroused suspicion that Eta’s influence has not entirely disappeared.

Yemen is one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, and has been devastated by civil war. Nawal Al-Maghafi, who was born in Yemen, has witnessed the deterioration of her homeland first hand.

Since starting in a Seattle garage 25 year ago, Amazon has changed the way many of us shop – but the company has its critics too, especially when it comes to the working conditions in its warehouses. This has led to a PR counter-offensive, and Amazon decided to open its doors to the public. Dave Lee accepted the invitation to take a tour of one of the company’s warehouses in California.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.3	Today we hear how a fight in a bar in a Spanish town has fired up old grudges in the Bas country.
0:12.4	Our correspondent goes back home to Yemen and
0:14.9	revisits her childhood hangouts now scarred by five years of war. And an
0:20.4	adventure, not up the Amazon but into Amazon, a tour of one of the online giants
0:26.6	cavernous warehouses in California, where the robots are already taking over. In 2017, nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled
0:36.9	Rakhine State in Myanmar across the border into Bangladesh, escaping what the
0:42.3	United Nations called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
0:46.9	Two years on Myanmar's government has said it wants to help Rohingya people return.
0:52.3	Jonathan Head was invited by the government to go on a rare
0:55.7	tour of the region where clearly it wanted to show off preparations for its new
1:00.4	repatriation program. A short walk up to some rusting padlock
1:05.0	gates and you're standing at one of the great ethnic fault lines in Asia. A few
1:10.2	hundred meters away just visible through the heat haze is the Bangladesh border post.
1:15.8	Two years ago this was one of the channels through which a tide of terrified Rohingya Muslims
1:21.1	fled from a savage military operation. Today it's still and silent, save for the buzzing
1:27.8	insects. Getting to this far-flung frontier between Myanmar and Bangladesh, between Southeast Asia and the Indian
1:34.9	subcontinent is difficult. Access to Rakhine State is so restricted, even UN staff are barred
1:42.0	from moving around.
1:43.0	We were only there because the Myanmar government had a message it wanted to broadcast.
1:48.0	In a row of prefabricated huts near the border post,
1:52.0	uniformed immigration officers sat behind tables, bearing fingerprint
	...

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