7 October 2026
Myanmar's military-backed leader Min Aung Hlaing arrived in Malaysia on 7 October for a two-day official visit at the invitation of Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The visit comes at an extraordinary moment: Malaysia is expanding the return of Myanmar nationals while the United Nations and human-rights organizations warn that conditions inside Myanmar remain unsafe.
For the Rohingya, however, Min Aung Hlaing is not simply another visiting foreign leader. He commanded Myanmar's armed forces during the military operations of 2017 that drove more than 1000 000 Rohingya into Bangladesh amid killings, rape, village destruction and mass displacement. The International Criminal Court prosecutor applied in November 2024 for an arrest warrant against him for the alleged crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya. That application remains pending before the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber. Separately, in February 2025, an Argentine federal court ordered arrest warrants for Min Aung Hlaing and other Myanmar officials in a universal-jurisdiction investigation concerning genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya.
Against that background, the sight of Min Aung Hlaing receiving an official invitation from Malaysia carries a significance far beyond ordinary diplomacy. Human Rights Watch has argued that Anwar's invitation risks facilitating further abuse and has urged Malaysia to halt returns to Myanmar. ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights has similarly warned that receiving Min Aung Hlaing on an official visit risks granting legitimacy to an authority responsible for grave abuses.
From Political Prisoner to Prime Minister
There is a painful historical irony in Anwar Ibrahim's role. Anwar himself knows what it means to lose one's freedom at the hands of political power. He spent years imprisoned in cases that he maintained were politically motivated. When he received a royal pardon and walked free in 2018, he spoke publicly about how incarceration had taught him the meaning and significance of freedom. His political identity was built in substantial part around Reformasi, justice, democratic rights and opposition to political repression.
That history makes Malaysia's present policy toward vulnerable people from Myanmar particularly difficult to reconcile with the principles Anwar once represented. A person who has experienced imprisonment should understand better than most that an assurance from those exercising coercive power is not the same thing as protection. Yet Anwar has said that Malaysia sought assurances from Myanmar authorities that returnees would be treated properly and would not suffer human-rights violations.
For Rohingya, such assurances are especially difficult to accept. The very military establishment being asked to guarantee their safety is the establishment under whose command Rohingya villages were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homeland.
Returning People to a Country That Is Still Unsafe
Malaysia has already returned thousands of Myanmar nationals during 2026. Nearly 1,500 people were transferred in the most recent large operation, while Malaysia and Myanmar have been discussing further returns. Anwar said on 6 October that no Rohingya were among the 1,476 people returned in the September operation, an important fact that must be acknowledged. However, he also confirmed that Rohingya are among the ethnic groups covered in discussions over returns.
The larger human-rights problem therefore remains. UNHCR was not given access to the 1,476 people before their return and consequently could not independently determine whether their decisions were genuinely free and informed. The agency warned that people returned to Myanmar could face serious risks and that some could require international protection. Reuters reported the same UN concern, including the fundamental principle that people should not be returned to places where they risk persecution, torture or serious threats to life and freedom.
Human Rights Watch has gone further, arguing that conditions for safe, dignified and voluntary return to Myanmar simply do not exist at present. Calling a return "voluntary" cannot by itself settle that question when the people making the decision have been held in immigration detention and UNHCR has been denied the opportunity to assess their protection needs.
The Rohingya Cannot Be an Electoral Calculation
Governments have legitimate responsibilities concerning immigration and border management. Malaysia also carries a burden that should not simply be ignored: it hosts more than 200,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers, including approximately 126,000 Rohingya. No country should be expected to carry a regional refugee crisis indefinitely without international assistance.
But refugees cannot become political currency. If vulnerable people are treated primarily according to whether their presence is electorally popular or unpopular, human rights cease to be rights. They become privileges granted only when politically convenient.
Anwar's government may calculate that a harder policy toward refugees will answer domestic political pressure. If so, that calculation risks being profoundly mistaken. Elections pass. Governments change. But decisions involving the lives of defenseless people enter the historical record.
Political leaders frequently remember injustice most vividly when they themselves are its victims. The harder moral test comes later: whether they remember that injustice when they finally possess the power to protect someone else.
Anwar once needed others to defend his freedom when his own future was in jeopardy. Today, people with far less political power depend on Malaysia not to deliver them into circumstances where persecution, forced recruitment or other grave abuses may await them.
History Will Record the Choice
Min Aung Hlaing's visit should therefore be understood as more than a bilateral diplomatic meeting. For Rohingya survivors, there is something deeply disturbing about watching a leader associated with the military campaign that destroyed their communities being welcomed officially while refugees from the same country face detention, hostility and possible return.
Anwar Ibrahim has spent much of his political life associated with reform, freedom and human dignity. Those principles have meaning only when they are extended to people who possess no vote, no wealth and little political influence.
Human beings often remember their own suffering for a lifetime yet forget surprisingly quickly what suffering requires of them once they acquire power.
Malaysia still has a choice. It can refuse to return Rohingya and other refugees to danger, restore meaningful UNHCR access to detainees, and make protection—not assurances from Myanmar's authorities—the standard governing every proposed return.
If it instead helps normalize Min Aung Hlaing while placing vulnerable people within reach of the system from which they fled, history may remember this episode very differently from the political calculation being made today.
For the Rohingya, the question is painfully simple: if the experience of persecution does not teach a former political prisoner to protect the persecuted when he finally has power, what was the lesson of that suffering?