This development was foreseeable: for a country that still has high levels of poverty and unemployment, hosting over a million refugees is clearly an enormous challenge, particularly for the communities hosting them in Cox’s Bazar. Now, the lack of progress on repatriation has left both the Bangladeshi people and the government increasingly frustrated – at Myanmar, outside actors and the refugees themselves. Although it opened its borders to the desperate refugees in 2017, Bangladesh made clear from the beginning that it would not allow them to stay indefinitely and that it expected international support to both host the Rohingya and facilitate their return to Myanmar. The Bangladeshi government’s decision to press on with relocating Rohingya to Bhasan Char reflects a hardening of its position toward the refugee population. (There were allegations of coercive relocations when the first refugees arrived there.) For those who do choose to relocate to Bhasan Char, escaping the worsening situation in the Cox’s Bazar camps is likely to be the major motivation. The memorandum could be a positive development as it commits Dhaka to ensuring that relocations are voluntary and refugees have accurate information on living conditions awaiting them on the island. In October 2021, the UN high commissioner for refugees, on behalf of UN agencies working on the Rohingya refugee response, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bangladeshi government to cooperate on service delivery to the island. From December of that year, it began sending thousands each month and it became fairly clear that Dhaka planned to continue relocations with or without international support. The Bangladeshi government eventually went ahead with the plan, anyway, moving the first group of Rohingya to the island in May 2020. Humanitarian organisations long lobbied against this plan, primarily out of concern about the island’s exposure to cyclones and flooding, as well as about limitations on freedom of movement and lack of access to livelihoods. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been pushing Bhasan Char as a “temporary solution”, insisting that it offers refugees better facilities than the overcrowded camps where most still reside. Others have paid hefty sums to traffickers to embark on dangerous boat journeys to Malaysia, which hosts the largest Rohingya refugee population after Bangladesh, while a smaller number seek passage to Indonesia.Īlmost 30,000 Rohingya have also relocated to Bhasan Char, a small silt island in the Bay of Bengal that the Bangladesh government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing specifically to host up to 100,000 refugees. An unknown number – almost certainly in the hundreds, but possibly in the thousands – have returned to Myanmar informally. The combination of prolonged displacement and deteriorating camp conditions has prompted some refugees to take difficult decisions about where their future lies. Partly in response to this violence, Bangladesh has been imposing tighter restrictions on the refugees, including limiting their ability to come and go from the camps, gain access to the internet and mix with locals. On the night of 9 August, two more community leaders were shot dead in the Jamtali camp. Bangladesh has blamed ARSA for the killing of a prominent Rohingya leader, Mohib Ullah, in September 2021. Factions within the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which launched attacks in Rakhine State in 20 that the Myanmar military used to justify its crackdown on the Muslim minority, have been fighting with rival groups for control of the camps. They have few job opportunities and little access to formal education, while crime and violence, including killings of Rohingya community leaders, are on the rise. Most live in Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp in the world. Living conditions for the refugees are poor and worsening. The two countries have not yet been able to restart the process, and prospects for returns have only grown dimmer following the Myanmar coup in February 2021. There were two failed attempts, in 20, to convince several thousand refugees to return, but those selected were unwilling to join the process absent sufficient Myanmar government assurances about their security, access to citizenship and livelihood opportunities upon return. To date, not a single refugee has returned to Rakhine State through the formal repatriation mechanism that Myanmar and Bangladesh set up in November 2017, soon after the exodus started. The total number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh – including both those displaced by the 2017 atrocities and the several hundred thousand who sought refuge earlier – is close to one million. Nearly all of the approximately 730,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar in the second half of 2017 remain in sprawling refugee camps in southern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. What is the situation of the Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh five years ago?
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