BANGLADESH’S Refugee Commissioner Abul Kalan said today that plans to repatriate 700,000 Rohingya refugees to Myanmar had to be scrapped because no-one was “willing to go back home now.”

The announcement was made after around 1,000 Rohingya refugees protested against returning to Myanmar. “[We] can’t force them to go,” Mr Kalan said, but the country will continue to try to “motivate them so it happens.”

At the Unchiprang camp, one of the refugee settlements near Cox's Bazaar, another Bangladeshi refugee official implored the Rohingya to return home over a loudspeaker.