Khamin takes an in-depth look at the state of Rohingya refugees, whose influx into Bangladesh over the last 30 years, from neighbouring Myanmar, is severely stretching the country’s resources.Mohammad Haseem is a Rohingya, living with his wife and his six-year-old daughter at the Kutupalang refugee camp in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazaar.
On September 2, he arrives at the office of AFM Fazle Rabbi, a designated magistrate who is in charge of the camp, to reissue his ID card.His original master registration card issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was seized from him during his arrest by the Teknaf police, on August 19, for being found travelling outside the perimeters of the three square kilometres camp area. Without an ID card, Haseem does not qualify as a refugee and will be deprived of some of his basic needs such as daily rations and health care from the camp.
‘I came to Bangladesh with the hope of securing a better life but instead, I am leading a life which is worse than that of an animal with so much uncertainty surrounding the future,’ says Haseem who fled Myanmar with his family along with 12 others, who have all met a fate similar to his.
Haseem and his family along with an estimated 10,000 other registered refugees now find themselves crammed into makeshift tents, in the Kutupalang camp. Their movements are restricted to within the intangible confines of the camp – as drawing any visible boundaries would be in violation of refugee law – with two check-posts set up to patrol the camp. These refugees are also not allowed to work outside camp premises without permission from relevant authorities.
Around 30,000 other Rohingyas, mostly relatives of those living inside the camp, are living in the Kutupalang area without any official documentation so as to certify them as refugees.
They are mostly settled in and around the camp premises in hope of being enlisted in the camp’s books which would secure rations, health care and education for them. However, their wait has proved fruitless as the registration procedures have been inactive since 1992 and no signs of its revival seem forthcoming. Consequently, some of them have had to resort to anti-social activities to draw some kind of livelihood to sustain their families with.
The Rohingya are an ethnic minority group with the majority of their population, an estimated 7,25,000 concentrated in the North Arakan state of Myanmar where they make up almost 80 per cent of the total population. Of South Asian descent and with their own dialect, they profess to Islam, which distinguishes them from the majority of the Buddhist population of East Asian lineage.
Since Myanmar’s independence in 1948, the Rohingyas have gradually been excluded from the process of nation-building. Following the end of democratic rule in the country in 1962, the military regime under the leadership of General Ne Win with his Burma Socialist Programme Party pursued policies to implement the Burmese way to socialism, which resulted in oppression against minorities as precedence was given to a state-sanctioned form of Buddhism.
This led to a mass exodus of Rohingyas mostly to Bangladesh in 1978 and again in 1991. On both occasions, diplomatic pressure persuaded Myanmar to initiate a repatriation process, however, the exodus still continues in massive amounts.
In total, there are around six camps sheltering Rohingyas in Teknaf, two of which in Ukhia and Nayapara, are the only ones to accommodate officially registered refugees. According to the estimates compiled by the Bangladesh government, there are 23, 857 Rohingya refugees residing in these two camps with around 9,857 and 14,000 in the Kutupalang and Nayapara camps respectively. However, the UNHCR have listed the number down at 28,389 refugees, registered in its books.
The administration of these camps is overseen by the office of the refugee and repatriation commissioner (RRRC), under the ministry of food and disaster management.
‘We are trying to maintain the refugees in these camps as well as possible while preparing an official and reliable list of refugees,’ says Feroz Salah Uddin, refugee commissioner of RRRC in Cox’s Bazar.
While the aforementioned camps are reportedly not receiving any supplementary aid to operate, the other camps – one at Leda accommodating approximately 10,000 and the three at Gondom sheltering 5,000 Rohingyas each – have received assistance from several non-governmental organisations with the Leda camp being maintained by Islamic Aid-UK. However, none of the Rohingyas living in these camps, located within two kilometres of the Myanmar border, have been officially recognised as refugees nor are their names likely to be found in the cleared list for repatriation.
On a more worrying note, there are approximately 4,50,000 unregistered migrant Rohingyas who have settled into either permanent or temporary residences outside the refugee camps, in various parts of Teknaf, Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong and Bandarban, according to Mohammad Taher, a sub editor of Kaladan Press Network (World Wide Rohingya Media) and Mohammad Yunus, head of the Urban Refugee Union at Teknaf.
‘We are trying to tackle the problem of the 400,000 unregistered refugees with the Dhaka government, which has said it wants to send Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar as soon as possible’, Kitty McKinsey, the regional spokeswoman for the UNHCR in Asia was recently quoted as saying in a press briefing.
Meanwhile, Ayesha, living in a makeshift tent in the Kutupalang camp, enters the magistrate’s office to file for a divorce. She has been estranged from her husband for the best part of two years after his marriage with two other women within the camp.
Ayesha, a registered refugee, was born in Myanmar but migrated to Bangladesh with her mother in 1978
‘In 2005, I went back to Myanmar with the hope of seeking repatriation but I found out that my name was not included in the cleared list of only 8,000 refugees approved by the Myanmar government for repatriation,’ she says.
‘Now I am at a complete loss for words to explain my situation and do not know what other possible misfortune the future might have in store for me,’ adds a decidedly dejected Ayesha.
Observers believe that a part of the reason for the migration of Rohingyas is the Citizenship Law which the military junta put in place in 1982 whereby, people of Indian and Chinese descent were deprived of full citizenship rights. As per law, three forms of citizenship exists in Myanmar, the ‘full’ citizenship granted to those belonging to one of the 135 national races to have settled in the country before 1823, ‘associate’ citizenship and ‘naturalized’ citizenship, which is only granted to people who are able to gather conclusive evidence of entry and residence in the country before its independence.
Most Rohingyas fall into the latter group but fail to fulfil the requirements of qualifying for the naturalized citizenship. They are only granted a temporary registration card, which cannot be used to claim citizenship and neither does it accrue any of the basic benefits such as security, free movement, marriage authorisation, health care and education.
Moreover, in recent times, many Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh cite accounts of oppression subjected to them by the NaSaKa, Myanmar’s Border Administration Force, comprising elements of five government agencies, as the reason for their fleeing.
‘NaSaKa officers routinely barge into our homes at night, searching for any evidence with which to persecute us. They usually look for unlawfully married couple or unregistered guests and there have even been times when women in certain households were abused and even raped,’ says Hamida, who fled to Bangladesh, two months ago with her five daughters.
Such perilous threats posed to leading a decent life in Myanmar have driven people like Hamida and Mohammad Haseem out of the country and into Bangladesh, across the river Naf, in search of greener pastures.
Upon their arrival in Bangladesh, however, they invariably see a completely different picture to the one they had envisioned as these Rohingyas are faced with uphill struggles to secure livelihoods, often falling under the influence of local politicians who promise to include them in the regional voter lists or acquire citizenships for their families in exchange of money.
Monir Hossain migrated to Bangladesh with his family in 1992. Most of his family members hold Bangladeshi citizenships which they had acquired during the tenure of the previous Awami League government in 1997. Some have even acquired Bangladeshi passports like Jane Alam, a resident at the Kutupalang camp, who received his from the Chittagong passport office in 2004.
Many Rohingyas have also been included in the voter lists between 1978 to 1990, while there are around 45,000 Rohingya voters enlisted in the recently updated version in the Teknaf-Ukhia constituency.
Local politicians use them to form a strong voting base and often use their services for smuggling and trafficking oil, fertilisers, cows, and rice, admits Shaha Kamal Chowdhury, chairman of Raja Palang union parishad in Ukhia. They are also being used to cut down forest areas as well being engaged in other criminal activities such as land- grabbing, robbing and murders. In return, these Rohingyas are often allocated land in some of the deforested areas to build huts on, for which they pay around Tk 500 to political henchmen on a monthly basis.
‘The influx of Rohingyas is becoming a huge problem and they are becoming a burden on Bangladesh. However, their migration into the country will not stop any time soon as lawmakers, chairmen and members of the union parisad in this area do not want their repatriation,’ says Badal Barua, a social activist in Cox’s Bazaar.
Foreign Minister Dipu Moni admitted the continuous flow of illegal entrants was causing huge damage to our scarce land, forest and other resources and they are a heavy burden economically, socially, environmentally on Bangladesh.
‘The influx of Rohingyas will continue unless there is a qualitative change in the Arakan state, also known as Rakhine state, in western Myanmar, where most of the group resides,’ she says.
‘The Rohingya problem has been lingering for more than 30 years, and Myanmar must take steps to solve it. The issue has been raised prominently among the countries affected by Rohingya refugees, and we hope Myanmar will do the needful to retain their people within its territory’, she adds.
On an environmental front, the geo-diversity of areas such as Ukhia, Teknaf, Bandarban and Cox’s Bazaar are being adversely affected by their arrival as hundreds of acres of forest land as well as resources have been destroyed for their accommodation. Around 11,000 and 5,000 acres of forest land had been lost in Ukhia and Teknaf respectively, between 2006 and 2007, while Motiur Rahman, Ukhia forest ranger and Abdul Kader, Teknaf forest ranger claim to have arrested hundreds of Rohingyas for their encroachment of the forests during their two years in the job.
The increasing Rohingya population could also prove to have a straining impact on the local labour market in future, believes Nurul Hoque, a retired professor and former principal of Cox’s Bazar Government College.
‘The population concentration of Rohingyas in areas like Ukhia and Teknaf is growing rapidly and there is probably a ratio of one Rohingya out of every 100 people while in the hilly areas of Alikadam and Nikkhangchhari in Bandarban, the ratio is significantly higher,’ observes Nurul who was also a consultant to the UNHCR from 1991 to 2000.
According to the UNICEF, the crude birth rate (CBR), expressed as number of births per 1,000, among the Bangladeshi population was 25 in 2007 while the CBR among the Rohingya population (calculations based on findings at the Kutupalang and Nayapara camps) is 40, which points to a faster population growth rate among them while their death rates are also considerably lower.
‘As for Rohingyas living outside the camps, awareness about family planning is indeed very low and this is partly due to the fact that Rohingyas are excluded from most local NGOs’ awareness programmes available in the Cox’s Bazar district,’ says Chris Lewa, a Thailand-based researcher and coordinator of an Arakan project for the last 10 years.
Despite the continuing influx of Rohingyas bringing with them, as many have argued, economic and social strains on Bangladesh, Myanmar have shown a great deal of reluctance in conducting a repatriation process for them. Around 2,36,000 Rohingyas have been repatriated since 1992 with the last batch of 8,000 returning in 2005. Around 900 Rohingyas have also immigrated to other parts of the world such as Canada, USA, Australia, Norway, UK, New Zealand and Ireland since 1991.
‘If the government can take the initiative to talk to the Myanmar junta about an international link road with Myanmar, why is it not talking about the issue of Rohingyas with them?’ asks CR Abrar, migration expert and professor of international relations at the Dhaka University.
Chris Lewa recommends that Myanmar reviews the 1982 Citizenship Law to ensure compliance of the legislation with the country’s international human rights obligations.
He also believes that urgent measures should be taken by the Myanmar government to eliminate discriminatory practices against the Muslim minority in the North Arakan (Rakhine) state. In addition, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand should put in place effective mechanisms to allow Rohingyas access to protection as refugees, according to Chris.
‘We cannot forcibly send back the Rohingyas to Myanmar because they are coming to Bangladesh as they are being deprived of free movement and employment while others find that their lives are risked if they choose to remain in Myanmar,’ says CR Abrar.
‘An exact refugee law, with regards to identifying the status of refugees, is very important for any country, however, Bangladesh has yet to enact such a law or establish a refugee board,’ he adds.
He also believes that creating international pressure against Myanmar regarding the issue as well as integrating Rohingyas to other developed countries are among the many ways to remedy the situation.
