'bitter end' for Rohingya

When it comes to writing about the plight of refugees, one can often feel like a broken record. There is a disheartening sense that everything has been said, twice, and yet nothing changes for the better. Indeed, there's a kind of perverse Murphy's Law at work. Every new twist marks an expansion of our understanding of the threshold for human misery, and of our capacity for failing our fellow man. This is particularly true for the Rohingya.

Things were grim before Covid-19. As though the curveball of a global pandemic wasn't enough, there's now a cyclonic system brewing over the Bay of Bengal. In India, mass evacuations are under way and coastal populations are on high alert. Even if the intensity of the storm wanes somewhat before it makes landfall, it has the potential to deal a devastating blow to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet: the Rohingya refugees in the camps near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

Even during a relatively mild monsoon season, landslides pose a real, mortal threat to those forced to inhabit the ramshackle tents that dot the barren hills.

Under an enforced internet blackout, the refugees have little access to information about the pandemic. They've been told to wash their hands and are attempting to shelter in place and practice "social distancing" - as effectively as one can when living elbow to elbow under a tarpaulin.

As International Rescue Committee (IRC) Bangladesh country director Manish Agrawal pointed out in a statement released last week, the population density of these camps is 40,000 to 70,000 people per square kilometer - "… at least 1.6 times the population density on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where the disease spread four times as fast [as] in Wuhan at the peak of the outbreak."

My organization launched a program making reusable, washable cotton masks to distribute in the camps and host communities of Bangladesh, in a bid to boost preventive measures against disease spread, as well as promoting livelihoods during a time of great economic uncertainty. After all, there was little else we could do.

The news last week that the first cases of Covid-19 had been detected in and around the camps was at once horrifying and unsurprising.

As a humanitarian group that started as a search and rescue operation on the Mediterranean, we at Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) take a keen interest in maritime rescue policy.

At the time of writing, it is believed around as many as 1,000 Rohingya are stranded at sea, having been afloat for weeks. Credible reports suggest fatalities on board have been occurring with some regularity, and that the boats have been pushed on from territorial waters of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states - in direct dereliction of their obligations as signatories to the Bali Process, and in breach of international maritime law.

Saad Hammadi of Amnesty International's South Asia office called for parties to the Bali Process to convene a discussion to ensure that Rohingya refugees are able to be brought to shore "so that we do not see the sea become an invisible graveyard."

Some 308 Rohingya refugees who had been brought ashore after weeks of shuttling back and forth along the coast earlier this year are now interned on Bhasan Char.

Bhasan Char is an uninhabitable agglomeration of silt with no natural fresh water supply, making residents entirely dependent on supplies from the mainland.

Structures have been built to house the Rohingya there, but these are untested: No one knows how well they would weather a storm surge.

This shouldn't be something tested on unwitting refugees. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for Bangladesh to bring the 308 to shore, as Cyclone Amphan bears down.

That the 308 were rescued at all is to Bangladesh's credit - however, no nation deserves plaudits for meeting baseline requirements of maritime law.

The relocation of large numbers of people for emergency preparedness is a complicated logistical matter at the best of times, let alone with the looming threat of a killer communicable disease. In 2015, Bangladesh relocated almost one million people in anticipation of Cyclone Komen - notably, the Rohingya were not included in the evacuation plans.