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 on our hands incremental emergencies caused by overcrowding and extreme poverty, periodic floods, seasonal cyclones, diseases, resource shortages, steady deforestation, a dangerous drug trade, as well as human trafficking and smuggling.  The Rohingya presence may in large part be responsible for nursing these resulting crises, but because refugee hosting countries and their partners have full prerogative to handle problems that appear in and around refugee settlements, then the Bangladesh authorities share a high degree of responsibility in allowing some of these problems to become entrenched and for others to recur.

While it is true that we are still in early days of this refugee crisis – three years being a small measure in comparison to average duration of refugee situations which are of the order of 19 years – it is also true that Bangladeshis are wholly unsighted on what the Government policy is regarding the permanent solution. While citizens’ knowledge or engagement might be secondary to solving the actual crisis, but in a democracy, citizens have the right to be consulted on how a national crisis is resolved, and which resources are being allocated. Popular consultation is an inclusive approach that not only reflects on the transparent functioning of a democratic Government but would be a constructive route to finding a lasting solution. Instead concerned Bangladeshis have no knowledge of the policy and have certainly no stake in resolving the current stalemate. Upon a Google search, one finds writeups of international organisations, but local organisations’ accounts about their work or unmet needs in providing services to the refugees are noticeably absent. Media content is strictly monitored by the government for inexplicable reasons, which is one reason for low interest and low participation by local organisations or alternative humanitarian donors.

It should not be a surprise to us then that the only time we hear about the Rohingya in the news is when it is related to criminal activities, trafficking, forgery, trafficking, deforestation and so on; apart from a few widely circulated camp snapshots, Bangladeshis have no insight into what life in the camps is truly like. This is hardly sufficient to sustain regional or international spotlight on the issue, and unbarred reporting and publication about issues inside the camps is a key element in keeping dialogue about solutions moving.

The lack of a published strategy and this type of intermittent diplomacy has dealt an undeniable blow to Bangladesh’s natural leadership in international advocacy where our voice ought to have been the strongest, in guiding the international community’s pathways towards a solution. Our approach also alienates those we have protect – the Rohingya refugees – who are now looking beyond these boundaries, towards reckless gambles at sea that inadvertently undermine Bangladesh’s position and authority. As our effective diplomacy recedes, the refugees’ desperation increases. A lose-lose situation for both parties.

While the refugee crisis was straightforward from the start, and its response measures equally prescriptive in international law and soundly guided by the refugee Convention and historic experiences of the humanitarian community, Bangladesh inexplicably chose to reinvent its own wheel – a decision that has cost us time and precious resources and, in some cases, lost the confidence of our refugee constituents.

The Rohingya are globally recognized as prima facie refugees, meaning refugees until they are proven otherwise, which attest to the degree of evidence available about their persecution and their strong claim for ‘refugee’ status. This characterization could have made the decision regarding their rescue at sea much simpler, but when we do not accord them refugee rights, we suffer from a false crisis of decision-making and expend inordinate time and precious resources all the while eroding our accountability towards these persons whom we provide asylum.

Instances of delaying or denying basic services like registration, protection, education, communications and most importantly access to livelihoods, has repeatedly placed refugees at odds with its host and severely eroded trust between parties and meanwhile encouraged criminality, because human trafficking and drug trade have emerged as negative coping mechanisms among the impoverished Rohingya.

This present omnishambles is regrettably the result not only of the authorities’ refusal to consult in-country expertise, but also of our stubborn rejection of tried and proven international norms and practices in responding to refugee crises, while in some cases, even allowing the crisis to be conveniently used for criminality and short term profiteering by some quarters with long term consequences; such news is perpetually in local papers and need not be elaborated. Since the beginning of this influx in 2017, the refugees have been denied critical protection, services and even justice.  The current ad hoc and arguably unilateral handling of this crisis by Bangladeshi authorities is not edging it towards the preferred solution, is counterproductive, and moreover leaves the stakeholders in doubt about what our desired solution is, or what the alternative plan might be.

Meanwhile, the six lac Rohingya in Myanmar are living in fear and internal displacement and regional actors must be united and transparent in mounting a fitting regional foreign policy in the event Myanmar contrives for the remaining Rohingya to flee as well. In all the measures that Bangladesh adopted, there were continual elements of surprise which has taken aback refugee rights activists like myself; by choosing to adopt unconventional and unprecedented decisions regarding this crisis, the Government has firstly thrown into disarray avenues for predictable collaboration among stakeholders, and introduced uncertainty in the humanitarian planning of national and international agencies alike, and also reduces the confidence of donors regarding efficacious use of funding.

The Government has doggedly focused on the ‘repatriation’ solution, and tried to drive home the gravitas of our intent by denying refugees several fundamental entitlements of refuge in the interim, arguably to speed up repatriation, ignoring the fact that Myanmar was not demonstrating minimum sincerity about prompt repatriation, instead biding time to remove existing evidence of atrocities against the Rohingya. It is increasingly evident that our policymakers have now accepted the inefficacy of our foreign policy to date, and have since opted for some other non-traditional ‘avenues’.

One of these avenues is the apparently unannounced establishment of an offshore satellite refugee camp for the Rohingya in a wholly separate district away from the border, deprioritising refugee protection concerns and lacking any consultation among the main stakeholders. On the table we have another abruptly-presented solution of partial relocation of refugees to the reclaimed island that humanitarian actors were not given the chance to plan for even though the government’s idea dates back to 2017. Nevertheless, this Bhashan Char satellite refugee relocation option has potential for acceptance, but only if the established norms are applied from the start. The factor that could clinch success is the refugees’ bona fide voluntariness, coupled with the willingness of some of the main services providers to relocate their service delivery operations to the island. As the Rohingya are prima facie refugees, they are under all circumstances entitled to international protection and basic services to be provided to them. In the absence of the Government’s ability to alone provide these said entitlements, agencies are working in partnership with it.

The Government of Bangladesh did not want to reveal its strategies and regrettably, for a problem so vast where collaboration can be the biggest strength and safeguard – still engages in closed door decision-making with select partners, ad hoc measures in planning and shuns any consultative approach with civil society, with the refugees themselves or even with long term experts. While there is expert thinking and scholarship on Rohingya matters in Bangladesh over the past three decades, the Government’s Rohingya policymakers do not include any of the renowned names in academia, research or practice and rely primarily on the Foreign and Cabinet Ministry staff. The Rohingya issue has therefore remained a crisis of second guessing and a constant stream of conjectures on the part of the humanitarian agencies about what the next move in crisis response from Bangladesh would be.

These destabilizing elements of ‘surprise’ that the humanitarian community experienced, came in several forms including conjectures about – whether the Rohingya were going to receive ‘refugee’ status by Bangladesh or remain tagged as ‘forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals’ which lacks any legal connotation and therefore does not accord any rights, whether the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR would be allowed access to register them or whether they would receive rudimentary enlistment by an inexperienced entity without any proper assessment of family linkages or protection needs, whether the Rohingya would be allowed even to cross the border at the height of the crisis or not, whether refugee children would be allowed basic education per refugee camp norms, whether the refugees should be engaged in productive livelihoods or live indefinitely on handouts and basic nutrient diet, whether refugee families would be allowed access to communications media at the height of the pandemic where information dissemination was key to saving lives in congested settings, and whether their traffickers’ boat adrift at sea for months would be allowed to dock, even though by all indications they were in distress at sea.

Each of these choices, made unconventionally by Bangladeshi authorities, and without consultation with refugee experts, have delayed valuable protection and assistance to refugees, and have made working conditions for humanitarian actors challenging. The main sufferers in each instance were the refugees themselves, whose victimisation has continued in asylum. While geopolitical considerations continue to be prioritised by all actors not only Bangladesh, the Rohingya get no closer to dignity or closure, and are pushed to resort to last-ditch attempts at desperate measures before all their families’ resources are depleted.

The fact that these persons have survived ‘genocidal acts’ should preclude any further aggression against them like separation from their families, forced relocation, denial of basic rights, extrajudicial killings and disproportionate punitive measure against victims of trafficking. These are some of the wrongs we had collectively inflicted upon those who have been victims of crossfire, whom we have denied education or those 300 refugees rescued at sea whom we have forcefully quarantined in Bhashan Char, as hopeful bait for others to want to relocate.

Farheen Khan
Farheenk7@gmail.com 
01817584393

"Farheen is a humanitarian worker and refugee rights activist who has worked on refugee issues in Asia and Africa.”