Myanmar has agreed to repatriate 5,000 Rohingya refugees from Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur said Wednesday, in a rare move announced days after Malaysian authorities detained dozens of refugees.
Malaysia hosts more than 215,000 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with the U.N. refugee agency, including more than 126,000 members of Myanmar's persecuted Rohingya minority, making them the country's largest refugee community.
"People ask why we do not simply send them back. Send them where? Myanmar had refused to accept them before," Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said during a visit to a town east of the capital, according to local media.
"Now, because of our good relations with Myanmar, they have agreed to take back 5,000 from Malaysia," media outlets including the daily New Straits Times quoted Anwar as saying.
His remarks come days after Malaysian authorities detained more than 100 Rohingya refugees outside a U.N. refugee agency facility in Kuala Lumpur.
A Rohingya rights group in Malaysia said the group sought shelter after they were threatened with eviction from an informal settlement in northern Penang state.
Officials later confirmed that the detainees had valid documentation issued by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Bernama news agency said.
A senior police official said Wednesday that the group had been released and sent to various locations around Malaysia, after undergoing final verification.
Despite sheltering one of Southeast Asia's biggest refugee populations, Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not formally recognise refugee status.
AFP fact-checkers have found that Rohingya refugees in Malaysia have been targeted by online disinformation campaigns that rights advocates say are fueling xenophobia and intimidation.
Many of the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim group, escaped Myanmar during a brutal military crackdown in 2017.
The campaign, which saw Rohingya villages burned and civilians killed, is the subject of a genocide case at the United Nations' top court in The Hague.
Myanmar's leaders have previously insisted the Rohingya are ethnic descendants of immigrants from Bangladesh and that their 2017 crackdown targeted an alleged armed uprising.
