152 C. FAULKNER AND S. SCHIFFER some percentage of Rohingya to return (those with documentation), their status as stateless would remain, as would the lack of a durable solution. As noted, the repatriation of the Rohingya beginning in September 1992, though initially welcomed by the UN, was a blatant violation of the non-refoulement principle. Myanmar’s government made no attempt to rectify the Rohingya’s status in the Rakhine State, nor did they offer any assurances that Rohingya would not face continued persecution as illegal immigrants. Under international law, refugees are by definition ‘unrepatriable’ (Zieck, 1997, p. 116). Put differently, because they still face the threat of persecution and death in their home country, including by being designated as stateless, any repatriation effort should be considered refoulement as it places the repatriated population back into the very environment they originally sought to flee. The Rohingya, in the years following their movement to Bangladesh, were still considered stateless refugees – their lot in Myanmar had not yet improved, making their successful repatriation unlikely. At the time of writing, with estimates now suggesting between 900,000 and 1.3 million Rohingya in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to another repatriation. The agreement looks remarkably similar to the 1992 MOU and the results could parallel the case of mass refugee refoulement seen in the 1990s, only on a significantly larger scale. Quickly losing favour in the world after her peaceful rise to power, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has the potential to oversee the forced movement of nearly one million Rohingya back to the Rakhine State where they remain stateless and vulnerable to the same persecution they have experienced over the past four decades. As Grundy-Warr and Wong (1997, p. 88) noted over two decades ago, ‘. . . the statelessness of the Rohingyas cannot be resolved by repatriation if they are not granted full citizenship rights by their own central government’. Citizenship Rights and Repatriation: The Case of Angolan Refugees The 1990s Rohingya repatriation stands in stark contrast to the repatriation of Angolans in the early 2000s. April 2002 saw the official termination of Angola’s 27year civil war with nearly half a million refugees residing in neighbouring states including Congo, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Namibia, and South Africa (CFR, 2002). However, less than two years after the end of the war over 280,000 refugees successfully returned to Angola, nearly a third as part of the UNHCR’s voluntary repatriation programme (Posa, 2005, p. 2). By the end of the UNHCR’s voluntary repatriation programme (which ended in March 2007) an estimated 410,000 refugees had returned, 138,594 returning with UNHCR assistance (Simao, 2007). Although largely seen as successful, it is important first to note that the repatriation still resulted in the denial of rights to Angolan citizens, including being subjected to violence. Throughout the conflict many lost identification documents, and the country’s birth registration system as well as numerous archives were damaged. This left many returning refugees without the documentation necessary to establish citizenship (Posa, 2005, p. 12). Thus, returnees faced denial of the right to citizenship, with reports suggesting many instances of harassment (Human Rights Watch, 2003). Even more alarming, reports indicated that some returnees were beaten and even raped as government forces aimed to deter diamond smuggling amidst