Between Two Statelessnesses: How Bangladesh’s Refugee Politics Mirrors Myanmar’s Denial

In March 2025, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced that food rations for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh would be halved—from 12 to 6 US dollars per person per month (Reuters, Mar 5 2025). The UN agencies immediately warned that the cut could have “dire consequences” for more than one million refugees (Reuters, Mar 24 2025). For the Rohingya, who depend almost entirely on aid to survive, this was not just a budgetary adjustment; it was a verdict on their place in the world.

At almost the same time, The Guardian reported that Bangladesh had closed its border to Rohingya fleeing new violence in Rakhine State. One refugee, speaking from the camps near Cox’s Bazar, summed up the collective despair: “We’ve lost all hope.” (Guardian, Jan 22 2025). The statement was not rhetoric but a measure of exhaustion after eight years of limbo—denied citizenship in Myanmar and refused a future in Bangladesh.

UNHCR officials confirmed that basic services in the camps were near collapse. The United States’ 73 million-dollar emergency infusion (AP, 2025) could only delay further cuts. Even as these warnings circulated, aid agencies quietly began using a new phrase to describe the situation: a “protracted crisis.” The term sounded technical, but it revealed a collective resignation that the world no longer expected solutions. Moral urgency had matured into fatigue.

Containment as Policy

Bangladesh’s 2017 decision to open its border was once celebrated as an act of human solidarity. But over time, the refugee response shifted from emergency aid to containment. Human Rights Watch (2022) documented how barbed-wire fencing now rings the camps, restricting movement and creating an environment of constant surveillance. Rohingya-run shops and markets—once small spaces of economic autonomy—have been demolished under the pretext of security regulation. The organization found that even routine travel to nearby markets or medical facilities requires special permission from camp authorities. This administrative control has turned a refugee community into a managed population.

A previous HRW investigation (2021) had warned that the same barbed-wire fences that supposedly protect refugees trapped them during a massive camp fire, resulting in deaths and injuries. The report argued that Bangladesh’s camp infrastructure was being designed for containment rather than safety. When protection and control share the same vocabulary, protection inevitably shrinks.

Education, the only pathway out of statelessness for a generation of children, has faced its own collapse. A joint HRW and UNICEF assessment in mid-2025 confirmed that over 230,000 Rohingya children were at risk of losing access to learning centres after funding was suspended (HRW Jun 25 2025; UNICEF May 31 2025). Formal schooling remains prohibited for refugee children (HRW 2020), a ban in place for years under the stated fear that integration would encourage permanence. The consequence is a generation growing up without recognized education certificates, unable to envision any life beyond the barbed wire.

Transfers to Bhasan Char—a remote silt island in the Bay of Bengal—continued through 2025. Reuters (2021; 2025 update) reported recurrent fires and persistent safety concerns. The project, once promoted as a solution to camp overcrowding, has become another form of geographical segregation. What began as humanitarian protection has evolved into a system of administrative containment—life preserved, but freedom suspended.

A Region That Chooses Silence

The regional response remains defined by avoidance. ASEAN, bound by its doctrine of “non-interference,” has treated the Rohingya tragedy as a domestic issue of Myanmar rather than a regional moral failure. In 2025, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights issued an appeal urging member states to put the Rohingya and the Myanmar conflict at the top of their agenda. The very need for such an appeal illustrated how little political space the crisis occupies in regional diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Aug 29 2025) documented continuing abuses in Rakhine State. Arbitrary detentions, forced displacement, and recruitment of Rohingya civilians persisted despite ceasefire claims. The New Humanitarian (Aug 27 2025) reported that the Arakan Army had detained Rohingya men and used them as forced labor, while Reuters (2025) revealed that Myanmar’s junta was recruiting Rohingya from Bangladesh’s camps to fight its war against the same Arakan Army. The circle of exploitation thus extends across borders: victims of genocide become tools in another power struggle.

For Bangladesh, these developments should have validated its caution against repatriation. Instead, they have strengthened its resolve to seal borders. Refugees who try to cross from Myanmar now find the gate closed, not by their persecutors but by their protectors. The Guardian’s interview (2025) captured this paradox vividly: a people trapped between a state that denies them and another that cannot afford to embrace them.

From Host to Warden

Academic research helps decode this pattern. MJ Lee’s 2021 analysis (Journal of International Humanitarian Action) showed that humanitarian mobilization rises and falls with media visibility. Once images fade, funding drops and policy follows. Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman’s 2024 study (Journalism & Media) found a marked decline in global coverage of the Rohingya crisis after 2018, replaced by stories about “management issues” and “donor fatigue.” SAGE’s 2023 paper on Visual Themes and Frames of the Rohingya Crisis revealed that media imagery had become repetitive—photographs recycled without context, atrocity rendered routine. This normalization of horror reduced urgency to administration.

Islam and Hasan (2021) examined Bangladeshi press coverage and found a parallel shift. Newspapers that once used the word “genocide” began focusing on “security,” “smuggling,” and “environmental impact.” The transition from empathy to suspicion mirrored official discourse. MR Howlader (2025) described the camps as “laboratories of humanitarian governance,” where international organizations sustain life without granting agency. Aid workers manage statistics, not citizens. When refugees become data points, their humanity shrinks to measurable outputs.

Together, these studies reveal a continuum: when media forgets, politics hardens; when politics hardens, compassion turns into control. Bangladesh’s policy of containment is not an isolated decision but a symptom of this broader fatigue. A host nation becomes a warden not through malice but through the erosion of imagination—the loss of any vision beyond management.

A Second Statelessness

The Rohingya’s original statelessness was legal, rooted in Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law that excluded them from the nation’s official ethnic list. Their new statelessness is administrative: enforced through ration cards, registration numbers, and fences. Both systems invoke security to justify control. Myanmar claimed the Rohingya posed a threat to national identity. Bangladesh now claims integration would threaten national stability. The logic is identical even if the methods differ: fear of permanence translates into policy of immobility.

The legal process of justice has not kept up. The International Court of Justice continues to hear The Gambia v. Myanmar case, but progress remains procedural and slow (ICJ Case Files 2025; IIMM Timeline 2025). Each hearing is a reminder that legal accountability can move forward even as the refugees themselves move backward. For the families in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char, justice is a distant abstraction—something that exists in The Hague but not in their daily lives.

The slow judicial process feeds the cycle of apathy. As MJ Lee noted (2021), when media interest wanes, international courts and donor states lose political momentum. The Rohingya case has thus become a study in how justice can stall in silence. Each delay in The Hague echoes as a longer stay behind the fence in Cox’s Bazar.

This new statelessness is not merely legal absence but social erasure. The refugees exist in records and reports but not in the moral imagination of nations. Aid sustains their bodies; policy contains their lives. Neither offers belonging.

Parallel Denials

The mirroring between Myanmar and Bangladesh is most visible in the language of justification. When Myanmar’s officials denied citizenship to the Rohingya, they called them “illegal Bengalis.” When Bangladesh officials reject education or movement rights, they warn against “illegal integration.” Both frames translate human presence into administrative threat. This is not equivalence of atrocity but of logic. In both cases, a state defines itself by its capacity to exclude.

The 2025 OHCHR update and The New Humanitarian report together demonstrate that the threat to Rohingya safety inside Myanmar has not ended. Yet Bangladesh’s border closure (Guardian 2025) ensures that those fleeing new violence remain stranded. Repatriation is thus a fiction sustained for diplomatic comfort. When states speak of “safe return,” they mean safe from responsibility.

Howlader’s 2025 analysis offers a sober interpretation: Bangladesh’s refugee policy has become a form of “humanitarian governance,” an arrangement where suffering is administered but never resolved. The refugees are protected from death but not from stagnation. This protection-without-progress defines their second statelessness.

Ethics of Witnessing

The Rohingya crisis also poses a challenge to how the world consumes suffering. Al-Zaman (2024) and the SAGE study (2023) show that when atrocity images repeat without context, audiences adapt psychologically. The shock that once demanded action now elicits scrolling. Humanitarian agencies adjust to this fatigue by adopting bureaucratic vocabulary: beneficiaries, caseloads, targets. Language protects professionals from despair, but it also erases emotion—the same emotion that once moved governments to act.

Islam and Hasan’s (2021) findings about Bangladeshi media fit this pattern. When local outlets echo governmental narratives of security and demography, public sympathy contracts. The Rohingya become statistics in budget debates rather than neighbors in need. This discursive shift from human rights to human management illustrates what Lee (2021) called “policy without pathos.”

At the international level, the same detachment is visible. MJ Lee (2021) notes that when global attention fades, humanitarian systems shift from urgency to maintenance. The ICJ’s slow proceedings (ICJ Case Files 2025; IIMM Timeline 2025) and the region’s muted diplomacy (APHR 2025) exemplify how empathy drains out of institutions as procedures take its place.

The Mirror of Denial

In March 2025, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced that monthly food rations for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh would be slashed to just six dollars per person (Reuters, Mar 5 2025). The agency warned that this decision, forced by dwindling funds, could have “dire consequences” for over a million people already living on the edge of survival (Reuters, Mar 24 2025).

For a community wholly dependent on international aid, that single number—six dollars—summed up the value the world now placed on their existence. It reflected a fatigue more dangerous than hostility: the exhaustion of empathy. The United States offered an emergency 73 million-dollar infusion (AP 2025), but the injection merely postponed collapse. UNHCR officials cautioned that health, water, and shelter programs were approaching failure. What was once a temporary emergency had hardened into a managed crisis.

At the same moment, The Guardian reported that Bangladesh was closing its border to new Rohingya arrivals fleeing renewed clashes in Rakhine State. “We’ve lost all hope,” one refugee told the paper from the camps near Cox’s Bazar (Guardian, Jan 22 2025). His despair echoed through an entire generation born between barbed-wire fences—citizens of nowhere, sustained by ration cards, forgotten by headlines.

Containment as Policy

Bangladesh’s 2017 decision to shelter nearly a million Rohingya was once hailed as humanitarian leadership. But the infrastructure built to protect them has evolved into an apparatus of restriction. A Human Rights Watch report (2022) detailed fences, guard posts, and surveillance systems that now enclose the camps. The demolition of refugee-run shops and markets, the report noted, destroyed the only spaces where people could earn or decide anything for themselves.

A previous HRW investigation (2021) described the deadly consequences of this design: barbed-wire fencing trapped residents during a massive fire, preventing escape. The fire itself became a metaphor—the camps were built to contain, not to save.

Education—the slender thread that connects a child to a future—has nearly snapped. HRW and UNICEF (Jun 25 2025 / May 31 2025) confirmed that more than 230 000 Rohingya children risked losing access to informal learning centers after donors withdrew funds. Formal schooling remains banned (HRW 2020), ensuring that no child earns a recognized certificate. The ban, justified by officials as a safeguard against “integration,” turns ignorance into policy.

On the distant silt island of Bhasan Char, transfers continue. Reuters (2021; 2025 update) recorded recurring fires and chronic safety fears. What was marketed as decongestion became exile within exile. Humanitarian shelter transformed quietly into administrative segregation—life preserved but freedom extinguished.

A Region That Chooses Silence

Southeast Asia’s response has been one of calculated neutrality. ASEAN’s long-standing rule of “non-interference” has insulated member states from moral responsibility. In 2025, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights pleaded with regional leaders to place the Rohingya and the Myanmar conflict on their agenda. The appeal itself proved the depth of regional neglect.

Meanwhile, the UN human-rights office (OHCHR, Aug 29 2025) documented continuing atrocities in Rakhine State—detentions, forced displacement, and arbitrary killings—demonstrating that “repatriation” remains an illusion. The New Humanitarian (Aug 27 2025) reported the Arakan Army’s forced labor of Rohingya civilians, while Reuters (2025) confirmed that Myanmar’s junta was recruiting Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh’s camps to fight against that same force. Victims of genocide were being recycled as soldiers in another war.

Faced with these realities, Bangladesh’s decision to seal its border might appear pragmatic. Yet the moral irony is stark: those escaping persecution now encounter closed gates from the very country that once received them as symbols of compassion. The border fence thus mirrors the mental fences of the region—nobody wants responsibility, everyone prefers distance.

From Host to Warden

Academic research exposes how empathy erodes into management. MJ Lee (2021) showed that humanitarian mobilization follows the curve of media attention: when cameras disappear, donors and policymakers drift away. Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman (2024) quantified this fatigue, showing that post-2018 global coverage of the Rohingya crisis dropped steeply, replaced by technocratic terms such as “coordination mechanisms” and “funding gaps.” A SAGE (2023) study on visual framing found that recycled imagery—identical faces, repeated camp scenes—had turned the Rohingya tragedy into visual wallpaper.

Within Bangladesh, the same discursive fatigue took root. Islam & Hasan (2021) tracked a clear lexical shift in local media: from atrocity and refugee to security and burden. Compassion gave way to caution. MR Howlader (2025) extended the analysis, calling the camps “laboratories of humanitarian governance,” where survival is meticulously organized but dignity deliberately postponed.

These studies converge on a single point: humanitarianism without horizon. Aid workers measure outputs, not futures; governments manage populations, not people. When compassion is bureaucratized, moral responsibility dissolves. Bangladesh’s policies—fencing, surveillance, relocation—are thus not anomalies but symptoms of a global order that treats displacement as data to be contained rather than injustice to be corrected.

A Second Statelessness

The Rohingya’s first statelessness was legislated by Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law. Their second is manufactured by neglect. Inside Bangladesh, identity is mediated through biometric registration and ration cards. Freedom of movement requires permission slips; education demands donor renewal. Both systems operate through control disguised as care.

Myanmar justified exclusion through nationalism. Bangladesh defends containment through the language of “temporary protection.” The underlying logic is identical: protection achieved by immobilizing the protected.

The ICJ’s proceedings in The Gambia v. Myanmar drag on (ICJ Case Files 2025; IIMM Timeline 2025). Each procedural delay widens the gulf between law and life. For refugees in Cox’s Bazar or Bhasan Char, international justice is not an instrument but an abstraction—a distant courtroom that validates suffering without ending it. MJ Lee’s (2021) finding that waning media coverage weakens legal momentum plays out here with precision. As attention ebbs, accountability recedes.

This second statelessness therefore has two pillars: administrative paralysis and diplomatic amnesia. It is a condition where people are counted but not recognized, protected but not free, remembered only when funding appeals require their numbers.

Parallel Denials

The resemblance between Myanmar’s exclusion and Bangladesh’s containment lies in narrative, not cruelty. Myanmar’s officials claimed that the Rohingya threatened national integrity. Bangladeshi authorities, while never denying humanitarian duty, argue that too much freedom or education would threaten social stability. Both turn fear into governance.

OHCHR (2025) confirms that persecution inside Myanmar continues; The New Humanitarian (2025) and Reuters (2025) record that Rohingya are still coerced or conscripted. Yet Bangladesh insists on “voluntary repatriation” as the only durable solution—an insistence detached from reality. The Guardian’s reporting (2025) captures the paradox: those escaping violence are denied entry because official policy imagines a future return that does not exist.

Howlader’s (2025) concept of “humanitarian governance” encapsulates this trap: a state may sincerely wish to protect but, lacking long-term political will, ends up administrating misery. Protection without progress becomes a mirror image of persecution without accountability.

The Ethics of Witnessing

Al-Zaman (2024) and the SAGE (2023) study together show that atrocity repeated without context numbs rather than awakens conscience. Once shocking photographs of burned villages and starving children now scroll past audiences desensitized by constant exposure. Humanitarian actors adapt by sanitizing language—“beneficiaries,” “cases,” “service delivery.” Each euphemism dulls the edge of empathy.

Islam & Hasan (2021) observed that Bangladeshi newsrooms now echo official policy frames, portraying the camps as potential threats to ecology and law and order. When national media cease to challenge authority, public empathy atrophies. MR Howlader (2025) found the same transformation within governance structures: refugees discussed as logistical variables.

In communication terms, this is what Lee (2021) called the politics of forgetting—the institutionalization of neglect. It is not active hostility but managed amnesia: committees meet, reports circulate, and nothing changes.

Humanitarianism Without Humanity

The Guardian’s frontline testimonies (2025) illustrate what bureaucratic phrases conceal. Refugees speak of hunger, fear, and confinement, not policy frameworks. Reuters’ figures—six dollars a month—quantify survival stripped of dignity. HRW and UNICEF document a generation deprived of education, while OHCHR and The New Humanitarian prove that return is unsafe. Combined, these accounts portray a humanitarianism emptied of humanity.

Howlader (2025) argues that international agencies “sustain life but not dignity.” That line could stand as the motto of the modern refugee regime. The UN’s funding appeals—934 million dollars sought for 2025–26—frame suffering as a solvable equation. Yet every dollar raised sustains the system of stasis: enough to live, never enough to move.

Bangladesh’s fear of permanence and the world’s fatigue with compassion meet in this equilibrium of endurance. The Rohingya survive, but survival has replaced justice as the goal.

Regional and Global Failure

ASEAN’s diplomatic paralysis reinforces this stasis. The APHR appeal (2025) urging member states to prioritize the Rohingya went unanswered. Regional governments treat Myanmar’s atrocities as domestic issues, shielding themselves behind the rhetoric of sovereignty. The same caution shapes global politics: Western nations cite “donor fatigue,” while international institutions issue appeals detached from enforcement.

Reuters (2025) and OHCHR (2025) show that violence inside Rakhine State has not ceased, yet repatriation frameworks continue to be drafted. These contradictions reveal how regional stability has replaced human security as the primary goal. For the Rohingya, that means perpetual limbo—safe enough not to shock, invisible enough not to disrupt diplomacy.

Conclusion: The Mirror of Moral Fatigue

Every cited source tells a coherent, tragic pattern. Aid shrinks (Reuters 2025). Education collapses (HRW 2025; UNICEF 2025). Movement is restricted (HRW 2022). Repatriation remains unsafe (OHCHR 2025; The New Humanitarian 2025). Regional actors stay neutral (APHR 2025). Global coverage fades (Al-Zaman 2024; Lee 2021). Each withdrawal of attention tightens the administrative grip.

Bangladesh, once celebrated for compassion, now administers the camps through the same vocabulary of fear that once defined Myanmar’s persecution. This is not moral equivalence—it is moral reflection. When empathy becomes paperwork and protection becomes containment, a host begins to resemble the oppressor it once condemned.

The Rohingya now inhabit two statelessnesses: one decreed by law in Myanmar, the other sustained by fatigue in Bangladesh. The first erased their nationality; the second erases their narrative. Between these erasures lies a void where policy replaces justice and management replaces mercy.

As the International Court of Justice deliberates and agencies negotiate, the refugees wait—not for verdicts but for recognition. The challenge, as every cited study and report confirms, is not merely to provide aid but to restore imagination: to see the Rohingya not as recipients of survival, but as people entitled to freedom.

Until that happens, fences will stand where empathy once flowed, and the world’s silence will continue to echo louder than any speech of solidarity.

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References

• Reuters (Mar 5 2025). UN to slash rations to Rohingya refugees by half to $6 per month.
• Reuters (Mar 24 2025). Rohingya in Bangladesh face dire consequences if aid money drops.
• The Guardian (Jan 22 2025). “We’ve lost all hope”: Rohingya trapped as Bangladesh closes Myanmar border.
• UNHCR (2025) service-collapse warning; AP (2025) $73 million U.S. infusion.
• HRW (2022). Barbed Wire and Shops Demolitions in Camps.
• HRW (2021). Fire Tragedy and Movement Restrictions.
• HRW (2020). Education Denied: Rohingya Children in Bangladesh.
• HRW (Jun 25 2025) and UNICEF (May 31 2025) on education suspension (≈230 000 children).*
• Reuters (2021, 2025) on Bhasan Char safety issues.*
• APHR (2025). Appeal to ASEAN leaders.
• OHCHR (Aug 29 2025). Myanmar Rights Update.
• The New Humanitarian (Aug 27 2025); Reuters (2025) on Arakan Army and junta recruitment.*
• MJ Lee (2021). Media Influence on Humanitarian Interventions. J. Int. Humanitarian Action.
• Md. Sayeed Al-Zaman (2024). Global Media Sentiments on the Rohingya Crisis. Journalism & Media.
• Visual Themes and Frames of the Rohingya Crisis (2023). SAGE.
• MR Howlader (2025). The Rohingya Crisis in Bangladesh: Challenges and Responses. Discover Global Society.
• Islam & Hasan (2021). The Rohingya Refugee in the Bangladeshi Press. Taylor & Francis.*
• ICJ (2025). The Gambia v. Myanmar Case Files.
• IIMM (2025). Procedural Timeline for Accountability.