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Relocating refugees to Bhashan Char: Will coercion suffice or could collaboration be more sustainable? PART II

Part II While the cost of the refugee situation to Bangladesh may be material, financial and environmental, the more grievous price of this crisis is paid for by the Rohingya in lives and livelihoods. In the humanitarian response, delays in registration and refugee status conferral translate to critical protection and life-saving support being deferred, a ban on livelihoods is leading to crippling idleness and aid dependence, limiting food assistance causes irreversible malnutrition among children, withholding of basic education leads to widespread hopelessness and negative coping mechanisms, and a lack of vision of hope and peace in the future can push even the most timid refugee towards life-threatening journeys at sea at the hands of traffickers, before reaching a state of complete destitution. Some of these problems inside the camps have become entrenched because they were not anticipated, or handled timely with adequate expertise or resourcefulness. With each policy decision aim...
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Relocating refugees to Bhashan Char: How do our present strategy and actions to date, bode for this move? PART I

PART I On the three-year anniversary of what is the third major Rohingya exodus from Myanmar to Bangladesh since the 1980s, we still lack clear and consistently-applied strategies for this crisis commensurate with the atrocity of the crimes committed and continuing against the Rohingya, and that meaningfully attempt to address their plight. Rather than focusing on refugee individuals or families, we treat the Rohingya as a faceless group, inevitably dehumanizing their existence. Without a national or regional strategy that unites the four major refugee hosting countries and that puts the refugees’ needs at the centre of a comprehensive regional solution, no viable end to the suffering can be imagined. This is a crisis of monstrous human consequences – at a minimum ethnic cleansing and at worst genocide – that if we continue to throw piecemeal remedies at, will birth other horrors, which it is already proving to do. In addition to the refugee crisis that we bargained for, we now have...
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Location: Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh
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