A Myanmar minister will tour camps for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, an official said Wednesday, the first such visit since Myanmar's army drove nearly 700,000 members of the Muslim minority over the border.
Bangladesh's foreign ministry confirmed that Myanmar's social welfare, relief and resettlement minister Win Myat Aye would visit the congested camps, which are home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees in total.
"His programme has not been fixed yet," Tareque Muhammad, a director-general at the foreign ministry, told AFP. The visit is slated for April 11 or 12.
Another Bangladeshi official told AFP it would be the first visit by a Myanmar minister to the camps, which have sheltered Rohingya refugees since the early 1990s, for more than a decade.
Win Myat Aye is the deputy head of a task force led by Aung San Suu Kyi on the crisis in Rakhine state, and a top official overseeing a stalled agreement with Bangladesh to repatriate some 750,000 refugees.
Myanmar has approved several hundred Rohingya from a list of thousands to return to their homeland, but not a single one has yet crossed back.
Rohingya community leaders in the camps said they would welcome the opportunity to raise their concerns about returning to Rakhine with the visiting Myanmar official.
"We would like to meet face-to face with the minister," Mohibullah told AFP.
© AFP