• Version
• Download 2
• File Size 2.03 MB
• File Count 1
• Create Date April 27, 2025
• Last Updated April 27, 2025

An Investigative Environmental Impact Assessment for Kutupalong Refugee Camp and Surroundings, Bangladesh

Introduction
The Rohingya Crisis
The Rohingya people are a stateless, ethnic minority group historically inhabiting the Rakhine region of Myanmar (previously known as Burma). They are an Indo-Aryan sect with the majority adhering to Islam, though a smaller subset are Christian or Hindu. The Rohingya are considered to be one of the most widely persecuted people in the world (Al Jazeera, 28 September 2017), enduring decades of apartheid-like legal and military measures against them by the Burmese government and military. The Rohingya have experienced significant military action as well as intensive propaganda campaigns throughout their history; in the last 100 years, the most notable attacks occurred in the 1970s, 1991-2, 2012, 2015, and 2016-present. In 1982, the government of Myanmar amended their nationality laws, removing citizenship and basic rights from the Rohingya (Lindblom et al., 2015). This refusal to acknowledge them as a people effectively made the Rohingya a stateless group, and allowed the government to cast them as illegal immigrants outside the national systems (Lindblom et al., 2015).
Further persecution has included acts of concerted, systematic dehumanization of this minority population, including but not limited to: severe military violence; violence against women; undue physical, mental, social, and economical stress; deliberate arson and destruction of Rohingya villages, and imposing measures to prohibit birth (Lindblom et al., 2015). Though many in the international community have described this as genocide, in accordance with Article II of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the UN and several international players have been careful to avoid this label. The United Nations affirmed in 2016 that the treatment of the Rohingya by the Myanmar military and government constitutes ethnic cleansing linked to a diaspora of the Rohingya population. Since 2012, over 168,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar (Tan, 2017), seeking refuge in neighbouring countries, most notably southern Bangladesh.Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have continued to live in Bangladesh since the early 1990s, though the government of Bangladesh discontinued its practice of granting official refugee status to Rohingya in 1992 (Human Rights Watch, 2000). Due to this restriction, many Rohingya immigrants live in Bangladesh as unregistered refugees; many are considered to be illegal immigrants. This status has left them with a reduced ability to secure resources and has caused increased stress to the undocumented populations and their environment, leading Bangladeshi officials to seek alternative settlement locations for the Rohingya. In dealing with the influx of unofficial refugees, Bangladesh has, on several occasions, sought to prohibit Rohingya immigration through legal and physical barriers, and has repeatedly sought repatriation agreements with Myanmar (Human Rights Watch, 2000). On October 24, 2017 Bangladesh and Myanmar began talks for potential repatriation in order to ease the strain on Bangladeshi camps and reunite Rohingyans to the Rakhine State (Looi, 2017).
Since August 2017, a renewed wave of the Rohingya diaspora began, with thousands arriving at southern Bangladeshi camps every day (Safi, 2017). The rapid influx of refugees arriving through marine and border crossings has inundated campsites and strained already scarce resources. This report will identify the environmental and socio-economic impacts of the Rohingya refugee crisis in the Kutupalong- and Balukhari camps, including the makeshift and expansion areas. This is further referred to as the ‘focus area’ and is shown below.