Myanmar says 10,000 migrants returned from Malaysia this year

Myanmar has repatriated nearly 10,000 migrants from Malaysia this year, state media reported on Monday, just after a ship carrying almost 1,500 of them docked in the country. The United Nations has criticized Malaysia's approach to returning migrants to Myanmar, citing concerns that it cannot guarantee safe arrivals in the war-torn nation. A group of 1,476 returnees arrived by ship near Yangon on Sunday, marking the first of the 5,000 that Malaysia agreed to take back amid rising anti-migrant sentiment in the country.

Rights monitors have expressed worry that Rohingya refugees may be among those sent back to Myanmar, where they have faced violent persecution. However, Malaysia has not disclosed the ethnicities of the returnees. In addition to the ship returns, 8,041 Myanmar citizens were repatriated by plane between January and August this year, according to the state newspaper The Global New Light of Myanmar.

While the ship returns have attracted significant attention in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur has not commented on the air repatriations. In total, Myanmar has reported that 9,517 migrants have returned by ship and plane this year. Malaysia maintains that the returnees voluntarily agreed to the repatriation from detention centers, where Myanmar claims they faced difficulties after serving sentences for immigration offenses.

However, rights groups have reported dire conditions in these facilities, and the UN refugee agency says it was not allowed to verify that the decisions to return were genuinely free and informed.

The Rohingya population in Malaysia is estimated to be over 100,000, with two-thirds of the 190,000 Myanmar refugees and asylum seekers in the country being Rohingya. Recent anti-migrant sentiment has focused on the Rohingya, who have been fleeing Myanmar since 2017 due to a military crackdown deemed a genocide by rights groups, a claim the armed forces have consistently denied. Since the military coup in Myanmar in 2021, over 100,000 people have been killed, according to monitoring organization ACLED.