It was, by any measure, an unusual photograph for Southeast Asian diplomacy: Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim receiving Myanmar’s military ruler, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, in Putrajaya for talks that put refugee returns at the top of the agenda. The meeting gave one of ASEAN’s most outspoken leaders a direct channel to the junta chief his bloc has spent years keeping at arm’s length.
Anwar has been among the region’s most persistent critics of Myanmar’s generals since the 2021 coup, repeatedly urging the junta to honour ASEAN’s stalled peace plan. Hosting Min Aung Hlaing in the Malaysian administrative capital therefore marked a deliberate change of register — from public criticism to direct negotiation — driven, officials indicated, by the practical question of the more than a million Rohingya and other Myanmar refugees scattered across the region, tens of thousands of them in Malaysia itself.
According to the reporting around the talks, repatriation dominated the discussion. Roughly 5,000 returns have been agreed as an initial framework, and a first group of 1,476 people departed on 29 September, a movement both governments could point to as evidence that the channel produces results rather than communiqués.
The diplomacy is delicate in both directions. For Min Aung Hlaing, a welcome in Putrajaya offers a measure of regional legitimacy that ASEAN’s formal processes have largely withheld since the coup. For Anwar, the risk is appearing to soften Malaysia’s stance; the counter-argument, made quietly by officials across the region for years, is that refugees only go home through deals with the people who control the territory they fled.
Whether the initial returns grow into something larger will depend on conditions inside Rakhine State and on how much trust either side banks from this first exchange. For now, the Putrajaya meeting stands as one of the clearest signs yet that Southeast Asia’s Myanmar policy is shifting from isolation toward transactional engagement — with Anwar Ibrahim, characteristically, at the front of the move.
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