The Rohingya: A Forgotten and Friendless People

In the middle of November, boats began washing up on the beaches of Aceh in western Indonesia. Each of the wind-lashed wooden vessels bore at least a hundred sick and emaciated Rohingya civilians seeking an escape from the heaving, unsanitary, and crime-ridden refugee camps of southern Bangladesh, where some had eked out a living for more than six years.

As of mid-December, more than 1,500 had arrived in Aceh, on the western tip of Sumatra, with many more expected before the onset of the monsoon in March 2024.

The arrival of the boats, in a density not seen in any previous year, is a sign of the increasingly desperate conditions in the refugee camps of southeastern Bangladesh, which are home to nearly 1 million people. Most of them are Rohingya civilians who fled to Bangladesh in August 2017, when the military launched a “clearance operation” in northern Rakhine State in response to scattered attacks by Rohingya militants. 

The offensive, which has been described both as “genocide” and a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing,” saw Myanmar soldiers and local vigilantes kill at least 6,700 people and expel more than 740,000, while shooting livestock and torching dozens of villages.

Six years on, these camps have grown into sprawling semi-permanent warrens of bamboo and tarpaulin, the establishment of which has swelled the population of Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district by around a third. As things stand, however, there is every chance that the camps will still be standing in another six years.

According to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, the “dignified and sustainable return [of refugees] to Myanmar remains the primary solution to the crisis.” However, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) stated in a report released in early December, the prospect of this happening any time soon is slim. 

Since the military coup of 2021, the security situation in Rakhine State has deteriorated markedly. While Bangladesh and Myanmar’s military government have pushed ahead with a pilot repatriation that would see 1,000 people return in its initial phase, many Rohingya are “skeptical of Naypyidaw’s assurances of their safety and wary of its refusal to grant them automatic citizenship,” the ICG wrote.

Add to this the fact that conflict has once again broken out between the military and the Arakan Army, one of the country’s most powerful ethnic armed groups, and the “safe, dignified, and voluntary return” of refugees, to use the prevailing term of art, seems all but impossible. “Six years after most of them fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State,” the ICG report stated, “the almost one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are no closer to returning home.”

At the same time conditions in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar are deteriorating as crime runs rampant and international agencies slash their assistance. Shortly after the release of the ICG’s report, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) published a report examining in granular detail the conditions in the camps. The report concluded that the Rohingya refugees are “at their most vulnerable since the crisis began.”

Even at the best of times, the conditions in the camps in Cox’s Bazar have been tough. Despite consisting only of single-story shelters, population density is nearly five times that of Singapore, the report stated, making fires a constant dry season hazard. 

On top of these quotidian challenges, the IISS detailed three trends that have contributed to the worsening humanitarian and security situation in the camps, and pushed many to seek asylum by sea. First, the waning support of international donors, their budgets stretched thin and their attention distracted by seemingly more pressing crises in other parts of the world, is having concrete impacts on the material conditions in the camps. Due to shortfalls in international donations, the U.N. World Food Program was twice forced to cut its food support, which has fallen from $12/month to $8/month per refugee. It has warned of a further cut to $6 in the absence of much-needed funds. 

In August, on the sixth anniversary of the Myanmar military’s “clearance operation,” the UNHCR warned of a “severe funding crisis” and called for foreign governments to step up. It added, “Any further cuts to the Rohingya response will severely impact access to food, shelter materials, cooking fuels, sanitation facilities, and livelihood activities.” As of November 30, donors had only provided funds for around half of the $867 million that the UNHCR requested in its Joint Response Plan for 2023, which provides protection and essential assistance to the refugees, as well as host communities in Cox’s Bazar.

The second factor is the punitive policy of the Bangladeshi government. Reluctant for the refugees to become de facto permanent residents, Dhaka has imposed strict limits on the refugees’ movement. It has banned them from working, and prevented them from education or travel. It has also barred them from opening bank accounts and registering SIM cards, and prevented the construction of more substantial shelters in the camps, lest they become effectively permanent settlements. Eager to be liberated from the burden of hosting the Rohingya, Bangladesh’s government sees no reason to make things comfortable for them.

Third, and most ominously, violence in the camps has spiked, driven by the turf wars that have taken place in the camps over the past year between Rohingya armed and criminal groups, some of them with ties to the Bangladeshi security services. 

In January 2023, a 12-hour gunfight took place between two rival militant-crime organizations, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) in No Man's Land, an unofficial camp for around 4,000 Rohingya between the Bangladesh and Myanmar border fences. The clash ended with the destruction of the settlement. The IISS report stated that “ongoing contestation between ARSA, the RSO and other smaller groups is likely to drive continued insecurity for the Rohingya.”

Given that the Bangladesh security forces lack the capacity to police the camps sufficiently, this fighting has been accompanied by an epidemic of crime, including theft, rape, and murder.

As the IISS report noted, there were at least 76 Rohingya-on-Rohingya murders in the camps in the year to October, more than double the number of killings that occurred in the whole of 2022. It added that kidnappings and abductions for ransom “have increased from a few dozen last year to more than 100 per month in 2023 and are usually accompanied by beatings and torture.” It noted that these crimes are most likely underreported. The report also included a map that detailed the areas of control of the various different armed gangs/factions.

To a great degree, the three trends identified by IISS are mutually reinforcing. As the ICG report noted, the actions of the Bangladesh authorities “have deepened refugees’ reliance on assistance and added to the cost of the humanitarian response,” right at the time that donors are constricting their budgets. Similarly, shrinking donor budgets have forced many into “taking drastic measures” in order to survive, including joining armed gangs, which at least have the virtue of paying a regular monthly salary. As IISS concluded, the result of these three trends has been a “a vicious cycle of insecurity” in the camps, which has left Rohingya refugees “with no good options.”

One of the only remaining outlets available for refugees is to pay people smugglers to bear them away from Cox’s Bazar by sea, in the hope of finding sanctuary in a third country, usually Indonesia and Malaysia. These figures have risen sharply over the past two years. The number of Rohingya undertaking perilous boat journeys to Indonesia and Malaysia jumped 360 percent between 2021 and 2022, when 3,705 embarked from Bangladesh by sea, according to the UNHCR. The agency recorded an estimated 3,974 people making the journeys in the year to December 14 of this year, of whom 225 were reported dead or missing. As mentioned, many more arrivals are expected in the weeks and months to come.

While Rohingya asylum seekers have previously met with hospitality in devoutly Islamic Aceh, even that appears to have come to an end in the most recent wave of boat arrivals. On December 19, around 200 people held a protest in Sabang island, off the western tip of Aceh, where two boats landed carrying hundreds of people, including women and children, on November 21 and December 2. Meanwhile, the Indonesian government has stated that it is not a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and therefore has no obligation nor capacity to accommodate refugees, let alone to provide permanent settlement.

All told, events in 2023 have merely underscored the assessment of the U.N. official who in 2009 described the Rohingya as “probably the most friendless people in the world.” About the best hope is that the current gains of Myanmar’s resistance leads to the downfall of the military junta and opens the way to safe and voluntary repatriations of the Rohingya back to the villages from which they were expelled in 2017. Even in this scenario, most are probably facing years more in limbo.