Relatives abroad keep refugees alive in camps
Rohingya who left in an earlier wave are pooling together limited resources to send money to the newly displaced
In a dimly lit shop in Kuala Lumpur, where dried fish, herbs and pickled tea leaves imported from Myanmar are on display, two men sit behind a counter inspecting bank notes.
“We send money to Balukhali and Kutupalong everyday,” one of the men 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.
Spike in remittances
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 asylumseekers, where many of them work as daily labourers, hawkers and construction workers.
Money transfer companies have reported a spike in remittances since the crisis erupted in August. 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.
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.
Mohammad Siddiq, 34, hands over cash to one of these agents every month to send money to his family in a camp for displaced people in Sittwe, the capital of Myanmar’s western Rakhine state. The agent notifies his counterparts in Sittwe, and the money is delivered to his family inside the camp. “We trust our people, the agents have been loyal to us,” said Siddiq, who has been in Malaysia for 13 years and supports himself by delivering chickens to shops.