The tour buses arrived at a stadium near Malaysia’s biggest navy base well before dawn on Tuesday, carrying hundreds of migrants from Myanmar who the Malaysian authorities said had agreed to get on a ship home.

But that was not the case for Maung Kyaw, who was scheduled to be on one of those vessels, according to his sister Thida Mon.

“He did not volunteer to go back,” she said, adding that she received a call from her brother last month. “He told me that they asked him to sign a paper and told him he would be sent back by ship.”

On Tuesday, Malaysia began a multiphase repatriation of thousands of undocumented migrants from Myanmar, in a move that the migrants, their families and rights groups say endangers many lives.

Many fear that Myanmar’s military government will conscript them — men and women — on their return and force them to fight in the country’s civil war. The Rohingya Muslims who make up a large number of the migrants have a particular plight: They are essentially stateless in their own country and have suffered what the United States has determined was a genocide conducted by the Myanmar military.

After the sun rose on Tuesday, more than 40 buses headed four miles northwest from Manjung Stadium to the Lumut Naval Base, where three Myanmar Navy vessels — two warships and a hospital ship — were docked. A military helicopter circled above as the buses entered the base. About a thousand people then proceeded to get on the boats, while Malaysian soldiers and police stood guard.

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