"The government of Myanmar reached out late last month to the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have taken refuge in the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar with a seemingly straightforward plea: “Come back home.” That offer might have seemed irresistible for those familiar with conditions in the teeming refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. And the dozens of Rohingya refugees that Physicians for Human Rights has interviewed there over the past two years are almost unanimous in their desire to return to Myanmar. But that desire is offset by what they know about the nature of the government that made that offer. And those refugees have made clear that they’d rather endure the privations of their Bangladeshi refugee camps than risk returning to Myanmar any time soon. That’s a wise choice. Memories of the catastrophic campaign of widespread and systematic targeted violence by Myanmar security forces against Rohingya in northern Rakhine state beginning on August 25, 2017, are still painfully fresh among the survivors who fled to Bangladesh in fear of their lives. That campaign, executed on the pretext of an anti-terrorist operation aimed at the insurgent Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, entailed what both Physicians for Human Rights and the United Nations have documented as a catalogue of atrocities against Rohingya civilians including mass killings, rampant sexual violence, torture, mutilation and the torching of hundreds of Rohingya villages. In the two years since those crimes, the 740,000 Rohingya survivors of that violence who fled to safety in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar have watched in dismay as the Myanmar government has defied all international efforts for accountability. The authorities have failed to conduct impartial and independent investigations and have stymied the efforts of the UN and other bodies seeking to do so. A four-member commission formed by the Myanmar government to investigate the alleged crimes announced in December 2018 that it had found no evidence to corroborate the UN’s accusations, an assertion roundly rejected by human-rights groups. Any lingering hopes among Rohingya refugees that the government was willing and capable of providing meaningful accountability for the bloodshed of late 2017 were dashed with the confirmation this May that the Myanmar military had pardoned the only military personnel successfully prosecuted for their role in the violence: seven soldiers convicted in April 2018 of killing 10 Rohingya men and boys in the infamous Inn Din village massacre of September 2017..."