On June 11, news emerged that Myanmar and Bangladesh had held discussions in Naypyidaw about the repatriation of Rohingya refugees between the ambassador of Bangladesh to Myanmar, Dr Md. Monwar Hossain, and the Myanmar union minister for foreign affairs, U Tein Maung Swe. On the surface, this sounded like progress. But it raised an uncomfortable question: what is the point of negotiating repatriation with Myanmar’s central government when Rakhine State, the territory those refugees would return to, is no longer under that government’s control? The people fleeing into Bangladesh today are not running from Naypyidaw. They are running from the Arakan Army, which now dominates the realities on the ground in Rakhine. Talking to one party about a problem controlled by another is, at best, diplomatic theatre.
This contradiction is why Bangladesh’s response needs urgent rethinking, not only on humanitarian or diplomatic grounds, but also for national security. Four months into the tenure of the new BNP-led government, there has been no indication of fresh thinking on the issue. The challenge is no longer simply maintaining camps; it is managing a triangle involving the Rohingya, the Myanmar state, and the Arakan Army—something that the International Crisis Group (ICG) has also stressed in its latest commentary released on Wednesday.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Operational Data Portal, over the last two years, close to two hundred thousand new refugees have entered Bangladesh, as driving the Rohingya population out has become a routine tactic for the Arakan Army. People who were previously persecuted by the Myanmar military now face forced displacement, torture, and forcible recruitment by the Arakan Army, with some placed on the front line.
Meanwhile, the refugee camps remain overcrowded even as the UN’s World Food Programme has cut rations because of funding shortfalls. Hunger and idleness are a volatile mix. Pushed to the edge, many young men with no legal way to earn a living drift towards crimes like petty theft, gambling, extortion, and trafficking activities. Over a thousand Rohingya have drowned at sea attempting crossings arranged by traffickers. Yaba smuggling has surged, with refugees used as low-paid runners by networks that reach into the host community. These are not simply problems of refugee welfare but of law and order that bleed into national security eventually.
The key strategic question is how to reconcile the two facts pointing in opposite directions. Officially, Bangladesh recognises Myanmar’s government; in reality, the Arakan Army controls much of Rakhine. Bangladesh should therefore pursue a dual-track approach: maintain official engagement with Naypyidaw while opening discreet, pragmatic channels with the Arakan Army on border security, humanitarian access, and repatriation. Dhaka holds more leverage over the Arakan Army than it is using; the question is whether it has the will to exercise it. In short, it should be ready to use a stick-and-carrot policy.
The stick has two distinct parts that should not be confused. The first operates entirely within Bangladesh’s own borders. The refugee camps, alongside the adjacent sections of the Naf River and the Bay of Bengal, are firmly under its sovereign jurisdiction. When Arakan Army operatives use this territory to recruit, traffic, extort, or collude with armed factions, Bangladesh has the absolute right to enforce its laws. It has the unambiguous sovereign right to arrest, prosecute, and use proportionate force against them.
Action across the border into Rakhine is a different matter. Force against a non-state actor on another state’s territory sits in genuinely contested legal terrain. Incidents such as cross-border gunfire or the abduction of fishermen do not provide sufficient legal grounds for intervention. Bangladesh’s stronger position is to ground its firmness in protecting its own territory and recovering its abducted citizens, treating this as border security rather than intervention in Myanmar’s war, and keeping any threat to escalate beyond the frontier as implicit leverage rather than an openly asserted right.
The carrot is more immediate: the flow of essential commodities into Rakhine. With mainland supply routes severed by conflict, Rakhine State has become heavily dependent on goods entering through Bangladesh, from cooking oil, flour, soap, and garments to fuel and medicine, moving along the riverine and overland routes that crisscross the border. That dependence is Dhaka’s leverage. Bangladesh can make its position explicit: if the Arakan Army keeps destabilising and creating trouble along the border, the supply routes can be restricted; if it stops, the flow continues, and cooperation can even be formalised. None of this requires recognising the Arakan Army politically or abandoning the official diplomatic line. It requires only acknowledging who controls the ground. The Arakan Army is not moved by goodwill or UN resolutions; it is moved by pressure and self-interest and is far more likely to respond to concrete incentives than to threats alone. Many governments keep practical, unofficial contacts with non-state actors that control territory of interest. Since Myanmar’s military is very unlikely to retake Rakhine, Naypyidaw is unlikely to retaliate.
Any honest version of this strategy must confront one hard objection: if the Arakan Army is the very force now persecuting the Rohingya, what does it mean to negotiate their return to the territory it controls? Repatriation into the hands of the current persecutor is not repatriation in any meaningful sense. Any understanding on return must be conditional and verifiable, tied to guaranteed safety, civil status, and freedom of movement of the returnees, and ideally watched by international monitors. Used this way, the stick and carrot are not a path to handing the refugees back to their persecutors, but a way of using real leverage to change the Arakan Army’s behaviour so that the conditions for safe and dignified return can begin to exist at all. Without that conditionality, engagement becomes complicity; with it, it becomes the only realistic way to influence a party that currently answers to no one.
One of the least-discussed but most consequential dimensions of this crisis is how Bangladesh’s own security apparatus is managing, or failing to manage, the situation inside and around the camps and across the Rakhine border. The problem is that multiple agencies operate in the same space without a unified strategic framework, a common intelligence picture, or a clear division of responsibilities. There are persistent allegations that different intelligence agencies are pulling in different directions, and even that various state agencies quietly back different armed Rohingya factions. Such claims are difficult to verify and may be shaped by political interest, factional rivalry, or misinformation. But whether they are true or merely widely believed, they corrode the perception of state neutrality among refugee communities and risk strengthening the very groups that could later challenge Bangladesh’s security interests.
It is now imperative that the government define a single national strategy covering the Rohingya refugees, the armed Rohingya groups, the Arakan Army, the Myanmar military, and the repatriation objective, with all agencies operating within it. To support that strategy, a permanent joint intelligence coordination cell should be established in Cox’s Bazar, including representatives from all relevant agencies. Such a cell could focus collective attention on the Arakan Army’s activities, Myanmar government forces’ activities, the conduct of armed Rohingya groups, extremist recruitment, cross-border trafficking, criminal networks within both the refugee and host communities, and the connections between these groups and the Arakan Army in Rakhine.
A unified architecture of this kind would synchronise intelligence collection, refugee management, border security, diplomacy, and long-term planning for Rakhine. Even highly capable intelligence organisations produce fragmented outcomes when coordination is weak, despite pursuing the same ultimate objective. Multiple agencies working in the same space without a shared framework will, sooner or later, fail the national interest.
Finally, Bangladesh cannot ignore the human dimension. It cannot host such a large population indefinitely, yet the timing of repatriation is genuinely uncertain. Until return becomes possible, the government should invest far more in education and sustainable livelihoods in the camps, including vocational training in fields such as midwifery, caregiving, and nursing.
The Rohingya crisis is no longer solely humanitarian; it is a strategic, security, and diplomatic test. The ground in Rakhine has changed, and policies built on outdated assumptions will not deliver repatriation and other desirable outcomes. Bangladesh must keep engaging Myanmar and upholding international law, but it must also reckon with the new power that controls Rakhine State, combining strategic realism with humanitarian responsibility. The central challenge is not simply managing refugees, but adapting to a fast-changing reality and turning a prolonged crisis into a coherent, forward-looking national policy.
Brig General (Retd) Md Manzur Qader is a security and intelligence analyst, and executive director of Rohingya Advocacy Centre. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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