Rohingya man a refugee again after 40 years
kutupalong: Nearly four decades ago, Fazol Ahmed returned to his native Myanmar with his family under a Rohingya repatriation scheme. Now he is back in the teeming camps of Bangladesh with his wife and children, a refugee once again.
Fazol, 41, is among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have crossed into Bangladesh since an upsurge in violence in neighbouring Myanmar in August that the UN has said amounts to ethnic cleansing. Unlike most, he has been here before.
Fazol’s family fled an earlier wave of violence against the Muslim minority in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 1978, when he was still a child.
“We couldn’t take it any more,” he said, recalling the campaign of violence that forced his family of rice farmers from their village in mainly Buddhist Myanmar in 1978.
“They were kidnapping young people. They killed some and demanded ransoms for others,” he said, accusing the Myanmar army and the ethnic Rakhine Buddhists who also inhabit the state.
Impoverished, overcrowded Bangladesh is now home to nearly a million Rohingya refugees, the majority of whom have arrived in less than two months.
Dhaka has made clear it wants them to return to Myanmar and is in talks with the government about taking them back.
But Fazol’s experience demonstrates the difficulty of negotiating a lasting return to a country mired in a cycle of hate, where the Rohingya are reviled as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Last time around, Fazol’s family spent eight months in Bangladesh before returning under an agreement between the two countries’ governments whereby around 200,000 refugees were repatriated.
After two days of interrogation in an internment camp in Myanmar they arrived in their village of Shil Khali in Maungdaw, the district nearest the border with Bangladesh, to find their house damaged and all their crops destroyed.
Once the returned refugees were finally back on their feet, he said, their Buddhist neighbours returned to extort money from them.
Decades passed and Fazol married. His wife gave birth to four sons and two daughters.
Then in late August this year, he was preparing for early morning prayers when he heard a series of explosions. He rushed outside and saw fire in the distance.
“The army was firing rocket launchers at houses and mosques,” he said.
Fazol and his relatives rushed into the jungle before their own village came under attack.
He said he hid in the under- growth and watched as soldiers took women into the houses and slit the throats of young children.
The killing lasted three hours before the villagers’ bamboo homes were doused in petrol and set alight.
Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been severely criticised for her failure to curb the military crackdown, has said the country would take back “verified” refugees.
But for Fazol and others like him, that provides little hope.