First of all, I should say that the election victory of the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi in November has raised a lot of hope for the Rohingya, even though they had been excluded from the election and denied their voting rights for the first time in history during that November 2015 election. But so far, I cannot say that the situation has deteriorated. That's not the case, but it has also not improved. As I said, there have been a few very recent moves by the NLD that show that at least they are willingly addressing the situation. Now it's a matter of seeing how that's going to develop.
You may know that the NLD, for example, requested the international community not to use the term “Rohingya” and also not to use the term “Bengali”, which the previous government had been using all the time. Basically “Bengali” means “Bangladeshi” and implies that you are an outsider and that you should leave the country. Aung San Suu Kyi requested that this be done to try to defuse a bit of tension and to avoid, as she said, “emotive terms”. I think this move is quite reasonable, but, unfortunately, the reaction has not been that good because the Rohingya want to continue to be self identified as “Rohingya” and the Rakhine do not want to see even the Muslim community being called a “Muslim community” in the Rakhine State. They don't even accept that term; they want to call them “Bengalis”. So just with a term you can see how difficult it is to even address the problem.
So far in Rakhine State, the first step on the ground by the government of Aung San Suu Kyi has been through the committee I mentioned in my presentation. They have restarted what is called a “citizenship verification exercise”. Unfortunately, that also is not going very well because many Rohingya do not want to apply for this. First of all, they don't see why they should apply for citizenship when they consider that they used to be citizens anyway. Also, they want to see the word “Rohingya” put on the documents. At least Suu Kyi has removed “Bengali”, but you see that this discussion on terms is very deep inside Myanmar.
Just to finish, at the moment the Rohingya have refused to participate, and the Rakhine have also protested against it.