Rohingya refugees ‘drained’ by trauma
The suffering of this population had practically no response, UN refugee chief says
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh from violence in Myanmar have been “drained” by the trauma they suffered during the crisis and a struggle to overcome desperate want, the United Nations refugee chief said on Wednesday.
More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar since late August this year for neighbouring Bangladesh, driven out by a military clearance operation in Rakhine State.
The refugees’ suffering has caused an international outcry, spurring appeals by aid agencies for millions of dollars in funds to tackle the crisis. “I found this was a population that had almost no response.
Very passive,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN high commissioner for refugees, describing his visit late in September to camps where the refugees were staying.
“You almost felt there was nothing left and that everything had been drained by this,” he told Reuters in an interview in his first visit to the South Korean capital.
He saw the lassitude as a symptom of trauma, he added.
“We haven’t seen this kind of trauma for a very long, long time,” the Italian diplomat said. “Maybe I saw it in the ‘90s in central Africa.” Grandi coordinated UN humanitarian activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its 1996-97 civil war.