The head of Bangladesh’s interim government and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Muhammad Yunus, urged for a faster third-country resettlement process for Rohingya Muslims residing in the country. This appeal comes as a new wave of refugees flees to Bangladesh to escape the escalating violence faced in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

“The resettlement process should be easy, regular, and smooth,” said Yunus, during a meeting with the International Organization for Migration (IOM).  However, while the United States has reaffirmed its commitment to resettle thousands of Rohingya in its territory, the process itself has not been accelerated as appealed by Bangladesh’s government.

In the middle of this crisis, Bangladesh’s foreign minister, Mohammad Touhid Hossain, expressed that Bangladesh cannot accept more Rohingya refugees, calling attention to the overcrowded camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district. At the same time, Hossain urged India and other nations to accept a greater number of refugees within their territory, as an attempt to reallocate them.

This recent wave of violence in Myanmar is considered the worst since 2017. In recent months, around 8,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled across the border to its neighboring country, Bangladesh. They have risked everything to escape the increasing violence in their country. These new arrivals add up to the more than one million Rohingya refugees already living in Bangladesh’s overcrowded camps. Most of them arrived in 2017, fleeing the military-led crackdown that the United Nations described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

“One of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world”, this is how UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres describes the Rohingya. They are one of Myanmar’s many ethnic minorities, representing the largest percentage of Muslims in the country. Since 1949, most Rohingya have been denied citizenship and faced intense discriminatory policies by Myanmar’s government. For further understanding, a full historical chronology of this crisis can be found on the Crisis Index page of OWP.

Even though the international community has worked to provide significant humanitarian aid, there is still a lack of long-term solutions for Myanmar’s problem. The focus has often been directed to dealing with refugees, which helps alleviate the crisis but does not solve the problem at its core. By ignoring the root of the issue, the international community fails to address the challenge faced by Myanmar as a whole, resulting in provisory and unsustainable solutions that do not seem to work in the long term.

As long as the violence wave continues and intensifies in Myanmar, the safety and well-being of Rohingya Muslims will remain uncertain and precarious. The international community must start putting effort into elaborating creative solutions to address the roots of the issue and not only remediate the people affected by it. Only by eliminating the violent and discriminatory system in Myanmar, we will be able to secure lasting peace in the region and give back life dignity to the Rohingya community.