Who Cares About the Rohingya?

In mid-October, the head of the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR gave an interview to Reuters in which he detailed the difficulty of securing the funding necessary to feed and house the estimated 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, said that the United Nations had managed to secure only 42 percent of the $876 million needed for Rohingya refugees this year, a shortfall that had complicated short-term support for the refugee population. 

“This decline in humanitarian assistance makes it more difficult to continuously, for example, renew the shelters,” he told Reuters. “You have to invest money all the time and that money is becoming short, so conditions are now beginning to regress.” 

As a result, the World Food Program has this year twice reduced its food allocation for Rohingya refugees to just $8 per person per month.

Grandi was in Bangkok to host a meeting of regional high-level officials on the Rohingya refugee issue, seeking pledges and support from governments and the private sector. The meeting was attended by delegates from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as representatives of Rohingya organizations.

The meeting was aimed at providing for the 1 million Rohingya civilians who currently live in a series of large refugee camps around the city of Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh. Most fled there in August 2017, when the Myanmar military, in response to scattered attacks by Rohingya militants, launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing in which soldiers torched villages, shot fleeing civilians, and raped hundreds of women and girls. Many observers, including the U.S. government and U.N. human rights experts, have argued that the assault meets the legal criteria for genocide.

The problem is that six years after their mass expulsion from Myanmar’s Rakhine State by the Myanmar military, the Rohingya – never a priority for the world community, even in the hour of their expulsion – have receded even further from the arena of international concern.

The military coup of February 2021, which saw the overthrow of the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has plunged the nation into conflict, detracting attention from the plight of the Rohingya in Bangladesh, as well as the 125,000 who remain in the country. The coup has since been succeeded by series of crises that have galvanized  international attention –  in particular, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and last month’s rekindling of the Israel-Palestine conflict – and eclipsed the unresolved refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazar.

Speaking to The Associated Press on the sidelines of the Bangkok meeting, Grandi said that securing the funding necessary to provide for the refugees is becoming increasingly difficult because of the above issues. He urged the world not to forget the plight of the Rohingya refugees, the world's largest stateless population. 

On the same day as the Bangkok meeting, Rohingya refugees met with a visiting U.S. State Department official, urging Washington to boost food aid to them. “I have a family of seven members, and due to the reduction in rations, we are starving,” BenarNews quoted Nur Jahan, a refugee who met with Afreen Akhter, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, as saying. 

Grandi said that the situation greatly impacted the nation hosting the refugee population – i.e. Bangladesh – which is “suffering from [an] enormous burden.” 

“Something has got to change here,” he said. “Otherwise, really, I’m worried about the future of Rohingya refugees and the patience of the host country in hosting them.”

There are already signs that Bangladesh is tiring of the burden, and has spearheaded its own solutions to the refugee crisis, however imperfect. In late 2020, the Bangladeshi government began moving people to Bhasan Char, or “floating island,” a previously uninhabited island in the Bay of Bengal, in December 2020. According to the latest UNHCR figures, nearly 27,000 Rohingya refugees reside on the island and Dhaka plans to relocate up to 100,000 Rohingya refugees there in phases.

Earlier this year, UNHCR also took part in a controversial pilot project to repatriate Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh to Myanmar, despite stating publicly that the conditions are not currently safe enough for their return. The China-mediated pilot repatriation project, which would see some 1,140 Rohingya refugees returned to Myanmar, was roundly criticized by human rights groups.

Refugees, too, are seeking their own solutions. “Rohingya people are increasingly trying to go outside the camps in search of work, and many of them are being detained by police,” Nur Jahan told Akhter, the U.S. State Department official. “Others are getting involved in illicit activities because they don’t have enough food.”

Growing numbers are also choosing to pay considerable sums to human traffickers for deck space on small and often dangerously unseaworthy vessels in the hope of finding sanctuary in nations like Malaysia and Indonesia. UNHCR says that 2022 was likely one of the deadliest years at sea in almost a decade for the Rohingya. According to the agency, the year saw a “dramatic increase” in the number of people attempting to cross the Andaman Sea, from 287 in 2021 to 1,920 in 2022 – a more than six-fold increase. The report stated that 119 people have been reported dead or missing.

If securing the funds necessary to sustain the existing refugee population is a challenge, it pales in comparison to the difficulties involved in creating a comprehensive and lasting solution to the crisis. Grandi told the AP that a “voluntary, dignified return to Myanmar” by the Rohingya refugees is the most desirable solution, but acknowledged there are “many challenges that need to be overcome” – not least of which is the fact that the conditions in Rakhine State remain politically unstable. The 125,000 Rohingya civilians that remain in Rakhine are confined to 20 internment centers that the advocacy group Fortify Rights has likened to “modern concentration camps.” 

It is also unlikely that any Western nation will be willing to take more than a handful of refugees. Even Muslim nations like Malaysia that have traditionally been relatively friendly to Rohingya asylum seekers who turn up on their shores are becoming less amenable to new arrivals.

Amid the maelstrom of current events, a people once described as the “world's most persecuted minority” are well on the way to becoming its most forgotten, too.