Rohingyas send what little they can to relatives

In a dimly lit shop in Kuala Lumpur, where dried fish, herbs and pickled tealeaves imported from Myanmar are on display, two men sit behind a counter inspecting banknotes. “We send money to Balukhali and Kutupalong every day,” one of the men, wearing a long white robe and an Islamic skullcap, said to a Rohingya man approaching the counter. “Send today, money arrives on the same day,” he said.

The shop is among many in the Malaysian capital that Rohingya use to send money to the two vast refugee camps in Bangladesh since a military crackdown in August prompted over 600,000 members of the ethnic group to flee Myanmar. The Rohingya, a Muslim minority denied citizenship in Myanmar, have been escaping persecution in their mostly Buddhist homeland for decades but the latest exodus was the worst in years.

With Rohingya families still heading to the camps, refugees who left in earlier waves who have managed to establish some sort of modest livelihood are pooling together their limited resources to send money to the newly displaced. Much is flowing from Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country that is home to more than 50,000 Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers, where many of them work as daily laborers, hawkers and construction workers.

Money transfer companies have reported a spike in remittances since the crisis erupted in August. But the community is also tapping popular mobile money services and a centuries-old transfer system with roots in the Middle East to send financial aid to the camps for families to buy food, medicine and other necessities.

‘They have nothing now’ Rohingya refugee Kamal, who has been in Malaysia since 2012, said his parents and six siblings fled to Bangladesh’s Balukhali camp in October and are counting on him for financial support. Among them is his 65-year-old diabetic father who needs a regular supply of medicine. “They have nothing now, they have to buy every single thing,” Kamal told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a rented low-cost flat on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur that he and his wife share with another couple. “To boil water, they have to buy firewood and a bunch of wood is 40 taka (50 cents), which is enough to get a meal,” said the 30-yearold refugee, who uses a pseudonym to protect his identity.

Kamal uses bKash, a popular Bangladeshi mobile money service, to send money to his family from wages he earns working odd jobs - sometimes 1,000 taka ($12)and sometimes up to 5,000 taka ($60) - as often as he can. His family picks up the money in Bangladesh from certified agents using a code. An employee at a licensed money transfer firm in Pudu, an area in central Kuala Lumpur frequented by refugees, said she had received an average of 30 money transfer requests daily to Bangladesh since the latest violence erupted.

In the past, Myanmar refugees would typically send money to their homeland, rather than Bangladesh, said the staff member, who declined to give her name. Remitting money through an official transfer store requires the Rohingya to show their UN refugee cards. That’s not something all Rohingya in Malaysia possess - it can be a slow process for a newly arrived asylum-seeker to apply for refugee status, and applications are not always successful.

Those without official documents have turned to a network of informal transfer outlets modelled on the ancient “hawala” system which is based on trust, and typically leaves no paper trail. The system involves agents accepting funds in one country and promising to pay a beneficiary in another country in exchange for a fee that is smaller than at a bank. Hawala is popular among migrants in the Middle East and has been used to remit money to remote areas, where banking is out of reach or too costly. —Reuters