Rohingya face new danger with island quarantine
https://arab.news/wgnjn
More than a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar live huddled together in the giant refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh. Most have arrived there in the two-and-a-half years since the military of Myanmar started its “clearance operations” against the ethnic group, though some have lived in the region for far longer — testimony to prior assaults against these people by Myanmar. Cox’s Bazar is a genuine place of refuge in a world where refugees often live in the most precarious conditions. But, while Cox’s Bazar may offer these people a present, it does not currently offer them much of a future.
Bangladesh has gone above and beyond the call of duty in welcoming and protecting the Rohingya from the assaults of Myanmar. But Bangladesh is in no position to absorb 1 million people and give them all economic opportunities and a stable future. It is a poor country that struggles enough looking after its own poorest people. And it is in an increasingly precarious position because of climate change, as rising sea levels threaten to swallow up ever more farming land in the densely populated country, while extreme weather events during the monsoons are becoming ever more frequent.
For this reason, some Rohingya, even from Cox’s Bazar, have instead chosen to flee to the south, to Indonesia and especially to Malaysia, where they have also been welcomed with open arms and have found much better economic opportunities — until very recently that is. Amid the coronavirus disease pandemic, Malaysia has closed its borders, including along the coastline. Some local administrators have taken this to include refugees coming by sea. This means we have seen repeated incidents of Rohingya boats being turned away from Malaysia and then having to be rescued by the Bangladesh Coast Guard on their way back north.
Bhashan Char is not a suitable place for anyone to live; let alone a vulnerable, dependent refugee population like the Rohingya.
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
Bangladesh took care to rescue the stranded vessels, grant asylum once again and quarantine the refugees as per World Health Organization guidelines; once again demonstrating the very best of humanity and setting an example to the rest of the world with its compliance with international law on refugees.
Unfortunately, some aspects of the technical implementation of this process have been negative and it is right that international observers are concerned about what they may mean for the future. Despite international health volunteer organizations in Cox’s Bazar saying that they have the facilities and capacity to quarantine the rescued refugees near the rest of the Rohingya, so as to keep the community together, the government of Bangladesh has instead opted to quarantine them on Bhashan Char — a remote, uninhabited island where no international nongovernmental organizations have a presence.
The reason why this raises rather acute concerns is that the choice of this island was not arbitrary. Bhashan Char was chosen because the Dhaka government had last year built refugee camp infrastructure on the island with the thought of relocating large numbers of Rohingya there — a plan that drew very harsh and merited criticism from the international community and the Rohingya. It was hoped that this plan had been shelved. By choosing to quarantine those rescued from the boats on this island, the question of the relocation is reopened.
The bottom line is that Bhashan Char is not a suitable place for anyone to live; let alone a vulnerable, dependent refugee population like the Rohingya. In principle, the idea of quarantining those saved at sea in a remote location is sound. And, since refugee infrastructure has already been built there, Bhashan Char would seem to make sense as a location for those rescued at sea. But, if the international medical NGOs in Cox’s Bazar say they have the capacity to house them near Cox’s Bazar itself, they should be allowed to.
But there is a deeper issue that is not being discussed and is likely relevant here. Having a concentrated population of 1 million poor refugees all clustered in one place is going to be economically difficult for Bangladesh to manage — and it inevitably raises social barriers, which might hinder the integration of the refugees with mainstream Bangladeshi society. From this point of view, it would not be absurd or malevolent for the government of Bangladesh to split the Rohingya into smaller, more manageable groups, which can be interacted with more freely and where there is much less tendency for self-ghettoization among the refugees. On the other hand, that level of interaction between these smaller Rohingya groups and mainstream Bangladeshi society could well be taken to be a threat to the distinct cultural identity of the Rohingya.
If this is what is going on in the background of the Bangladesh government’s thinking on these issues, then this is a very delicate and difficult discussion with no obvious correct answer. And it may well be a discussion that needs to be held in the open between the government of Bangladesh, Bangladeshi society and the Rohingya themselves. But, in any case, Bhashan Char should not be a destination for anyone: Not the Rohingya or anyone else. If the government of Bangladesh does not alter its course on quarantining people there, we must be vigilant and not allow any of this settlement to become permanent.
- Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a director at the Center for Global Policy and author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim
