United Nations: Six years after the crisis erupted in Myanmar, almost a million Rohingya refugees are languishing in Bangladesh, most in the squalor of the world’s largest refugee camp located in the Cox’s Bazaar area, and hundreds are adrift on the high seas looking for asylum elsewhere, while a few thousand have reached safer shores.
Crises elsewhere, meanwhile, have grabbed international attention overtaking the Rohingya predicament.
“This is a crisis that should not be forgotten,” said Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
With fading attention, resources to help them dwindle and on the political front, efforts to help them return home falter.
An appeal by the UN last year for $876 million to help the Rohingya refugees met only 42 per cent of its target by October.
“If contributions decline, we are in trouble,” Grandi said of the programmes for them.
The shortfall in contributions translates to everyday hardships: The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) twice cut the food vouchers for the Rohingya last year, from $12 per month for each refugee to $10 in March and to $8 in May.
The WFP called it “another blow” to the refugees from “funding shortages”.
It said that even before the cuts that “four in 10 families were not consuming enough food and 12 per cent of children were acutely malnourished”.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “we have had a meaningful decrease in international financial support” for “the dramatic situation of the Rohingya refugees”, in Bangladesh.
“We are witnessing an enormous tragedy, and we lack the resources needed to respond to it,” he said.
The refugees huddling in makeshift shelters in the Cox’s Bazaar area also face the furies of nature, from cyclones and flooding and in May 2023 cyclone Mocha caused considerable damage.
Bangladesh is a reluctant host to the Rohingya and a solution to their plight with a safe return to their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine state is fading as they remain trapped in a limbo of virtual statelessness.
“Regrettably, the conditions for their safe, voluntary and dignified return are not yet in sight”, Guterres said.
The Rohingya are caught in an intractable situation because Myanmar does not consider them citizens under its 1982 nationality law and they are designated as “Bengali”.
This makes it all the more difficult for them to return to their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine state they had fled, and if they do it will be as less than full citizens with risks of expulsion hanging over them.
China is reported to have brokered a deal between Bangladesh and the Myanmar military junta for a pilot programme for their return to Rakhine state.
Bangladesh newspaper Daily Star reported in April that according to Bangladesh officials, 1,000 Rohingya were to be sent back to Rakhine and further action would be considered after seeing how the programme fared.
Human Rights Watch said that in May about 20 Rohingya were sent to Rakhine state to observe resettlement camps and report back.
The organisation said that those who made the visit and were interviewed by it “said that the detention-like conditions and lack of full citizenship rights were not conducive to a safe return”.
It quoted one of those interviewed: “We aren’t at all satisfied seeing the Rakhine situation. It’s another trap by Myanmar to take us back and then continue the abuses like they have been doing to us for decades”.
The pilot programme does not seem to have been implemented.
Rohingya have been going to Bangladesh in smaller waves after the many bouts of action against them, but it turned into a tsunami in August 2017 when Myanmar security forces unleashed a massive attack on Rohingya civilians in retaliation for an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on security posts.
Reeling from the counterattacks hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)
–IANS