NO WAY HOME FOR ROHINGYA LEFT WAITING TO LEARN OF THEIR FATE
With Myanmar unrepentant, group could become permanent casualties of political inertia and indifference
Now we are here seeking a peaceful place to live. I think we will all die looking for peace MOHAMMED SERUS Block leader in camp
It was once called the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis and, a year on, the plight of the Rohingya is becoming intractable.
Over three months starting in August last year, almost 725,000 Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh from Myanmar, leading the UN’s International Organisation for Migration to describe the mass movement as “unprecedented in terms of volume and speed”.
Attempts since to repatriate the refugees have failed to gain traction. The Myanmar government is yet to welcome home a single refugee from Bangladesh and the international community has been unwilling to apply significant pressure to force its co-operation.
Despite vigorous demands from the Bangladeshi government that the Rohingya must return home, observers – and refugees – increasingly fear their exile may be permanent.
The difficulties for those exiled is clearest on the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh at Tombru checkpoint, about 45 kilometres from Cox’s Bazar. Here, about 5,000 Rohingya refugees live in no man’s land between the Myanmar border fence and the muddy creek that forms the international border.
The refugees say they fear if they enter Bangladesh they will never be able to get home. Some can see their former lands from the shanty homes in which they scratch out an existence.
But the Myanmar government does not want them here. Hilltop military outposts are a stone’s throw from the camp.
A month ago, its soldiers fired into the camp to try to drive them off the land. Loudspeakers have broadcast warnings that anyone who left Myanmar illegally by crossing the border would be prosecuted if they tried to return.
“The world knows that we’ve been here for a year now,” says Arif, 42. “When will be allowed to return to our motherland?”
The Rohingya are adamant about their desire to go home but they will not do so without guarantees. They want citizenship rights, recognition of Rohingya as an official ethnic group of Myanmar and some kind of international protection. Some of those demands may have to wait.
“We think both sides will have to compromise,” a high-level Bangladeshi government official says.
Already struggling in an election year to govern the world’s most densely populated country, the Bangladesh cabinet says it cannot bear the burden of hosting the Rohingya community in the long term.
“We would like them to go home as soon as possible,” the official says.
In November last year, Bangladesh signed an agreement with Myanmar that repatriation should be voluntary, dignified and safe. But the agreement lays out no time frame.
The problem, Bangladeshi officials suggest privately, is Myanmar’s intransigence. The agreement says that the first step before repatriation would be to verify the identities of the forcibly displaced Rohingya.
In February, Bangladesh provided the first tranche of 8,000 names to Myanmar. Six months on, Myanmar has verified a few more than 2,000 of them. The numbers are a drop in the ocean.
The UN’s refugee agency has counted 891,233 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
“You can imagine how long it would take,” the official said.
Without leverage and keen to maintain good relations, Bangladesh says it is up to the international community to encourage Myanmar to accept the return of Rohingya. Global pressure is the only thing to which Myanmar responds, another official says.
But it is not an issue that has uniform agreement. China and Russia have opposed UN resolutions on Myanmar.
The US last week announced targeted sanctions against Myanmar military leaders it said were responsible for “violent campaigns against ethnic minority communities across Burma, including ethnic cleansing, massacres, sexual assault, extrajudicial killings and other serious human rights abuses”.
Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the US Treasury, said: “There must be justice for the victims and those who work to uncover these atrocities, with those responsible held to account for these abhorrent crimes.”
In the coming weeks, the International Criminal Court is expected to decide if its jurisdiction in Bangladesh is sufficient to hear cases involving forced deportation.
A UN fact finding mission and the US State Department are also expected to publish reports on the violence in Rakhine state.
But there is little sign that the threat of sanctions or promises of development aid, such as a recently proposed $100 million (Dh367.3m) World Bank loan to benefit Rakhine, will soften Myanmar’s hard-line stance on the Rohingya.
Myanmar’s army recently published a book giving its version of the Rakhine violence. Written by the army’s “directorate of public relations and psychological warfare”, the report denied genocide and rape by the nation’s forces.
It argues that Bengali invaders had tried to form an independent “Arkistan” in Rakhine.
“Despite living among peacocks, crows cannot become peacocks,” the report concludes.
Liam Mahony, who has written UN reports on the Rohingya, says “people are making comparisons to the Palestinians”, and that the Rohingya “might be refugees for generations”.
Non-government organisations and the UN are planning for a long-term response to the crisis.
“They struggle with that language of medium-term,” says Frank Kennedy, operations manager for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Bangladesh, referring to the government’s reluctance to approve the construction of permanent structures in the camps.
“Certainly we can discuss safer shelter. All social facilities can be longer term but for the individual houses, the government is still reluctant.”
In another bad omen for the refugees, zoologists from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature are sufficiently concerned about the long-term survival of Bangladesh’s endangered Asian elephants that they are lobbying for animal migration corridors to be built through the camp.
The Rohingya also fear the camp will be their home interminably.
“My grandfather sought peace in Myanmar but he didn’t find it before he died. My father too,” says Mohammed Serus, 33, a block leader in the camp. “Now we are here seeking a peaceful place to live. I think we will all die looking for peace.”