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On November 23rd, an agreement between the respective governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh was reached to repatriate the more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who have fled what the UN has described as a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” carried out by both Myanmar security forces and Buddhist extremist groups.

Despite this agreement, however, Rohingya Muslims continue to flee Myanmar for the relative safety of Bangladesh’s border. In fact, more than 3,000 Rohingya have crossed into Bangladesh in the four days that have followed the signing of the repatriation deal.

“The number of arrivals has declined, but it has not stopped,” a Bangladeshi military commander told the Dhaka Tribune.

And stop it won’t! Certainly not while realities on the ground remain unchanged. Not only is there an absence of evidence to suggest the violence against Rohingya Muslims has ceased, but also the agreement does not include any mechanism to guarantee the security of those who return.

When I asked Sattar Islam Nirob, a 28-year-old Rohingya refugee who lives in Kutapalong refugee camp inside the Bangladeshi border, if he intends to return to Myanmar, the country of his birth, he told me that neither him, his family, nor anyone he knows plans to leave the relative security of the Bangladeshi border.

“Why should I return?” he asked me. “Who will guarantee my safety?”

When I asked him on what conditions would he and other Rohingya Muslim refugees consider returning to the sites of their former villages, most having been destroyed by Myanmar security forces, Nirob told me that “citizenship, nationality, and security” are non-negotiable provisions for all Rohingya.

“Without nationality and citizenship, we [Rohingya] are nobody,” Nirob explained. “We have no rights. We can’t get jobs, go to school, or live in peace.”

Rohingya Muslims are considered by the Buddhist majority country to be foreign invaders. In fact, Myanmar government officials often refuse to give credence to the name Rohingya, arguing that it is a fictitious identity, preferring instead to refer to them as Bengalis, despite the fact the Rohingya have lived in the northern Rakhine state for hundreds of years.

In a statement issued last week, Amnesty International said Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar are “trapped in a vicious system of state-sponsored, institutionalized discrimination that amounts to apartheid,” likening their brutalized existence to surviving in an “open air prison.”

“The Myanmar authorities are keeping Rohingya women, men and children segregated and cowed in a dehumanizing system of apartheid. Their rights are violated daily and the repression has only intensified in recent years,” says Anna Neistat, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research.

When I interviewed a Pakistani humanitarian aid worker, who has spent the past several weeks in Kutapalong refugee camp, he told me Rohingya Muslim refugees he had seen were too “traumatized” to even consider returning, explaining that he had witnessed children with permanent and horrific injuries sustained from landmines, semiautomatic weapons, and even rocket-propelled-grenades.

How can any member state of the international community realistically expect any person to return to the site of their trauma without any guarantees for their future?

“Why does the world do nothing to help us? I wish the world saw us less as Muslims and more as humans,” Nirob told me.

To his point, it’s outrageous that the international community continues to do nothing to assist the “world’s most persecuted minority.” I mean, the United Nations has described Myanmar’s crackdown on the Rohingya as “textbook ethnic cleansing,” and last week the United States government also confirmed Myanmar’s violence constituted “ethnic cleansing.”

So where is the international peace keeping force to guarantee the security of the Rohingya? Where is the international pressure to encourage Myanmar to grant its Rohingya minority basic human rights?

The lack of international action is another black mark against the efficacy of the United Nations, demonstrating once again that when the interests of the great powers are not at risk, international response is not forthcoming.

In 2009, the United Nations passed resolution 308 known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P), thus establishing a new international norm, one that promises to protect human beings from state carried out genocide and ethnic cleansing. In short, it means that if a state cannot guarantee the security of its people, or rather if the state is the security threat to its people, then the international community has a responsibility to protect those threatened.

R2P has been credited with halting mass atrocities in Kenya, Burundi, Guinea, and Ivory Coast. And it can certainly be implemented easily and effectively in Myanmar without the risk of creating unforeseen conflict.

Simply, the Rohingya will not return without a guarantee of security and promise of basic human rights. “We can expect that the Rohingya would go back, but the reality is different. Their houses were burned down. Their women were killed and raped by the military and Buddhist groups. The Rohingya are unlikely to go back, unless there were guarantees from the international community,” said Humayun Kabir, a former Bangladesh ambassador to the United States.

The promise of “never again” now rests on that guarantee.

*(Image credit: European Commission DG/ flickr)