Rohingya Muslims face grim prospects
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh: With a repatriation plan in tatters and funding evaporating for a million refugees with ever-growing needs, Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar to Bangladesh face a grim future one year after the latest eruption of a decades- old conflict.
Raids by Rohingya militants on August 25 last year across Myanmar’s Rakhine state spurred an army crackdown which the United Nations has likened to “ethnic cleansing”.
Around 700,000 of the Muslim minority fled by foot or boat to Bangladesh, their villages ablaze behind them, in an exodus unprecedented in speed and scale.
The crisis has heaped enormous pressure on Bangladesh’s impoverished Cox’s Bazar district, which already hosted around 300,000 of the stateless group.
Myanmar says it is ready to take those who fled back.
But it refuses to recognise the Rohingya as citizens, falsely labelling them “Bengali” illegal immigrants.
A deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh to start sending them back has also gone nowhere, caught up in bureaucracy and mistrust, with fewer than 200 having been repatriated so far.
Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi this week said it was up to Bangladesh “to decide how quickly” repatriation can be done, while insisting the “terrorist threat” posed by Rohingya militants remains “real and present”.
Without safety, citizenship and compensation for homes and land torched or commandeered by the army since they fled, the Rohingya do not want to go back.
But life in the camps, among the most densely populated places on earth, looks set to get harder.
A UN-led appeal for around $1 billion to fund the refugees until March has yielded only a third of that sum.
The slow response has alarmed experts.
Without a major cash injection, “remarkable” success in controlling outbreaks of diphtheria, cholera and other diseases could be undone, he said, and provision of non-life saving help — such as family planning and mental health — will likely evaporate.
The World Bank has pledged $500 million to help with infrastructure, health and education of the Cox’s region.
But Bangladesh is tiring of its role as host and insists it will soon relocate around 100,000 Rohingya from Cox’s to a remote, floodprone island. AFP