Foreign minister Dipu Moni has said the Myanmar leaders during her latest trip to that country told her that they would take the Rohingya refugees back.

She told reporters at the foreign ministry on Friday that Myanmar authorities in December last year said Rohingyas were not Myanmar citizens but Bangladeshis.

"At a meeting on trafficking in persons in Bali, I presented historical data and necessary evidence on Rohingyas' Myanmarese identity.

"During my Myanmar visit (May 16-17), its leaders admitted that they are Myanmarese and agreed to take them back," the foreign minister.

She said Myanmar government sought a list from Dhaka on the number of Rohingyas living in Bangladesh as part of the repatriation process.

She observed that the influx of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar was not a new development, rather the Arakan people were continuously intruding into Bangladesh for long.

Her rather candid comments came as Bangladesh media reported massive intrusion of Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar and Bandarban districts.

Dipu Moni said the refugee flow would not stop unless Myanmar authorities guaranteed "qualitative change" in its Arakan state—Rohingyas' motherland.

"Rohigya influx is always there. They have been coming continuously.

"A small number of them are in the (UNHCR) camp. Huge numbers of them are outside the camp," Dipu Moni told reporters at foreign ministry on Friday.

"If there was no qualitative change in the place they come from, the influx would be continuing even though we send them back or Myanmar shows interest in taking them back," she said.

Foreign secretary Md Touhid Hossain said, "So far, there is no change in the environment they live in."

The foreign secretary made it clear that Dhaka would not accept any foreign national as its citizen.

Around 30,000 residual Rohigya refugees, Myanmar Muslims from the northern Rakhain state, have been living in camps in Cox's Bazar district as they are unwilling to return to Myanmar.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas fled into Bangladesh as the military junta in the former Burma cracked down on them to avert the international focus on its domestic affairs including power handover to democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Muslim Rohingyas are the minority in the Buddhist Myanmar.

As per a tripartite agreement with the UNHCR, most of the Rohingyas returned to their homeland, but they later intruded for better life in Bangladesh.

The military leadership, following a mass upsurge in 1988, gave national election in which Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy had landslide victory.

But the ruling generals refused to hand over power and put her in jail and finally on trial.

Source: bdnews24.com

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