Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing visits Malaysia amid concerns over repatriations

Myanmar’s military leader-turned-president, Min Aung Hlaing, arrived in Malaysia on Wednesday for a two-day visit that will centre on the sensitive question of sending thousands of Myanmar nationals back home, even as the United Nations and international rights organisations warn that returnees could be endangered by an escalating civil war.

Min Aung Hlaing landed at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 04:30 GMT, according to images carried by state media, marking his first trip to the Southeast Asian nation since he seized power in a coup in February 2021. He is scheduled to hold talks with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim during a visit that Kuala Lumpur has framed as a chance to deepen its direct dialogue with Myanmar’s embattled leadership.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, the Malaysian government said the visit would give the prime minister “an opportunity to sustain his direct engagement with Myanmar”. The statement identified the “voluntary, dignified and safe repatriation of Myanmar nationals of all ethnic groups who have been in Malaysia illegally” as a key item on the bilateral agenda. A spokeswoman for Min Aung Hlaing echoed that language, saying the talks would cover the return of Myanmar nationals currently residing in Malaysia.

The diplomatic engagement comes against the backdrop of a controversial repatriation drive already under way in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has pressed ahead with plans to send back thousands of Myanmar nationals despite explicit warnings from the UN and rights groups that those returned could face persecution, arbitrary detention or violence in a country where fighting between the military and opposition forces has raged for years.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since Min Aung Hlaing toppled the elected government in 2021, an act that triggered a nationwide conflict now estimated to have killed about 100,000 people and forced more than 3.5 million others from their homes. The scale of the displacement has made Myanmar one of the region’s most acute humanitarian crises, and it forms the core of the argument made by critics of the repatriation policy: that the country is not a safe destination for those being deported.

Min Aung Hlaing’s own political trajectory has complicated Malaysia’s calculations. The retired general oversaw a widely criticised election that allowed him to shed his purely military status and assume a civilian role, despite being subject to Western sanctions. Since formally taking the presidency in April, he has sought to rebuild Myanmar’s external relationships, visiting fellow ASEAN members Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as making trips to China, India, Russia and Belarus. His arrival in Kuala Lumpur extends that rehabilitation tour and signals a gradual re-engagement with a broader set of partners.

For Malaysia, the repatriation question is inseparable from domestic pressures. Earlier this year, a wave of online hate speech and misinformation directed at Myanmar nationals intensified scrutiny of undocumented migrants and refugees, with the Rohingya community facing the brunt of the hostility. Many Rohingya fled Myanmar after a brutal military crackdown in Rakhine state in 2017, and they now form one of Southeast Asia’s largest refugee populations.

Anwar has been unusually explicit about the linkage between refugee returns and his willingness to engage Myanmar’s leader. Speaking in a podcast last month, the prime minister said he would invite Min Aung Hlaing for an official visit if Myanmar agreed to take back thousands of Rohingya refugees. That condition, and the visit now under way, suggest the two issues have been bundled into a single negotiation.

Malaysia has deported roughly 10,000 Myanmar nationals since January, according to Anwar’s own figures. He has said that Myanmar authorities assured his government that those returned would not be harmed — an assurance that human rights organisations have treated with deep scepticism given the documented record of abuses inside the country since the coup.

The stakes are considerable. Malaysia hosts about 215,600 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, among them some 126,000 Rohingya. Despite that burden, Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and does not grant refugees formal legal status, treating them instead as undocumented migrants. That legal gap leaves the population vulnerable to detention and deportation, and it underpins the rights groups’ argument that deportations strip people of any meaningful protection.

Critics also point out that the phrase “voluntary, dignified and safe” appears in both governments’ statements, yet the reality on the ground is contested. The UN and rights organisations have repeatedly cautioned that returns conducted amid an active conflict cannot easily be described as voluntary or safe, and that assurances from Myanmar’s military authorities have historically proven difficult to verify.

Supporters of the engagement, meanwhile, argue that dialogue is the only practical lever Malaysia has. By keeping channels open with Min Aung Hlaing, Kuala Lumpur may be attempting to extract concrete guarantees about the treatment of returnees, even as it faces growing domestic pressure to reduce its migrant and refugee population.

The two-day visit will therefore test whether personal diplomacy can bridge the gap between ASEAN’s non-interference traditions and the mounting international demand for accountability in Myanmar. Whatever agreements emerge, the outcome will be watched closely by tens of thousands of Myanmar nationals in Malaysia who face an uncertain future, and by a region still grappling with the consequences of a coup that transformed a country and its diaspora.