Hope flouts on a  Boart: Rohingya

Hope flouts on a  Boart: Rohingya

Context

• According to Human Rights Watch, in Myanmar’s Rakhine province, in the three coastal areas of Maungdaw, Rathedaung and Buthidaung, 288 Rohingya villages were destroyed by the Myanmar army between August 25 and September 25, 2017.
• The Bangladesh government’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission (RRRC) is estimated to have accommodated 536,000 Rohingya refugees, of which more than 50% were children.

The history of migration

• Since 1978, there have been five major migrations of Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh. The most recent one that began on August 25 is the biggest.
• Most of the migration takes the route of the river Naf. It flows along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border until it meets the Bay of Bengal.
• Between August 29 and October 16, 26 boats capsized in the Naf river and the Bay of Bengal, costing 183 lives. Of them, 182 were Rohingya, half of them children. This is one of the reasons why the local administration banned “any entry by boat”.

Why not migrate via land?

• The land border remains open but is both more difficult to access and riskier.
• The internally displaced Rohingya prefer to flee by boat, as eastern Rakhine is much closer to riverine crossing points.
• On the other hand, to reach any of the half a dozen crossover points on land, they would have to walk for about two weeks through a mountainous terrain manned by the trigger-happy Myanmar military.

The upsurge in boatman charges

• In August, the boatmen are making 2,000-3,000 Taka per passenger as there weren’t any restrictions. But now with the ban, the boatmen are charging 7,000-10,000 Taka for each adult.
• Typically, the boat’s owner (known as the ‘Company’) gets 50% of the revenue, while the remaining 50% is split between the boatmen and his helpers, with the motorman and the assistant together receiving 50% of what the pilot (the one drives the boat) gets.

At the refugee camp

• Many have linked the internal displacement of Rohingya to the discovery of gas, as the villages of the Rohingya Muslims sit atop a large chunk of the reserves in Myanmar.
• Global experts such as Azeem Ibrahim, a senior fellow with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, see a connection between “the (Rohingya) genocide” and the “discovery of large offshore gas and oil supplies” which has drawn the attention of “leading companies… from China, India, Australia and South Korea”, with some of them obtaining “exploration licenses from the State-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise.”

The Status of refugee shelter

• The camp is a temporary shelter, set up in a forest area. A thousand trees were felled to make way for 8 by 10 ft tents made of plastic sheets.
• The shelters are on either side of the road in ankle-deep mud. The stench of human faeces is overpowering.
• Clean water and hygienic food are in severe short supply. Despite the best efforts of aid agencies and the RRRC, filth floats on stagnant pools around the makeshift shanties.

Private humanitarian networks

• Well established “private humanitarian network” with people in Europe and West Asia, which secretly arrange for money to fund the transfer, mainly of women and children, from Myanmar to Bangladesh are looking into this matter.
• The network has a handful of volunteers who pay the Company and arrange the boats. The money bypasses the established banking networks and uses the route of Hundi or alternative remittance.
• The volunteers are paid the money in Bangladesh on the basis of instructions issued by the person who is funding the boat trip from outside Bangladesh.
• Senior police officials said that they were aware of such “engagements” but could not do much about it.

What remains the issue then?

• The main problem is that there are no boats in Myanmar to bring the refugees. Any boat that brings the refugees to safety has to leave from Bangladesh.
• If the boats are disallowed, then the people stranded on the beach will die as the Myanmar military will not allow them to enter the mainland by crossing the Arakan range.