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A Sustainable Policy for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh
Asia Report N°303 | 27 December 2019
- International Crisis Group • Avenue Louise 235 • 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Bangladesh is host to roughly one million Rohingya refugees, most of whom fled over the border following a brutal military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State that began in August 2017. While generously providing safe haven to this enormous population, Bangladesh has sought to treat the displacement crisis as a short-term challenge, focusing on the importance of repatriation and refusing to engage in multi-year planning. This approach has not succeeded. Repatriation efforts have stalled, crime and violence in the Rohingya camps and around them in southern Bangladesh appear to be on the rise, and Dhaka has reacted increasingly sharply. In August, it began rolling out stringent restrictions on refugees and NGOs that are interfering with the delivery of humanitarian assistance in the camps and alienating refugees, thus potentially aggravating local insecurity. Bangladesh should reverse the counterproductive measures it has imposed, publicly acknowledge the long-term nature of the crisis it is facing and begin working with external partners and refugees to mobilise the resources needed to meet it.
In late 2017, after the number of Rohingya refugees crossing the border began to diminish, Bangladesh and Myanmar moved quickly to put in place a repatriation mechanism, but so far no refugees have returned through these formal channels. Myanmar appears unwilling to create the conditions needed to encourage refugees to return, while Bangladesh and its foreign partners generally appear to lack the leverage to push Myanmar to address key issues such as citizenship and security for the Rohingya. China, Naypyitaw’s most important regional partner, appears reluctant to throw its full weight behind this push, and even if it did, it is unclear whether its weight would be sufficient.
Although Bangladeshi officials privately acknowledge that the refugees are unlikely to return in the near or even medium term, the country’s policy toward the Rohingya remains focused on near-term repatriation. Dhaka worries that by publicly acknowledging that Bangladesh will be hosting these refugees for years to come, it will reduce pressure on Myanmar to make the changes needed to enable repatriation, and could create a pull factor that draws yet more Rohingya over the border. As a result, it is restricting the humanitarian response to meeting the refugees’ immediate needs, rather than addressing long-term challenges such as building durable shelters to withstand the region’s harsh monsoons, developing programs to help refugees become more self-reliant through education and the creation of livelihood opportunities, or helping host communities absorb the impact of the refugees on the local economy. These are the kinds of programs and resources that will over time become increasingly important to Dhaka’s successful management of the crisis.
Recently, Bangladesh has begun moving in the opposite direction by clamping down on refugees and humanitarian activities. In August – amid rising concern about insecurity in southern Bangladesh – Dhaka began rolling out new restrictions on refugees’ freedom of movement and access to mobile phones, as well as on NGO operations in the camps. It has begun fencing some of the camps and says it will build watchtowers and install surveillance cameras. Although plans are not firm, it has also announced that it will press ahead with relocating some refugees to a silt island in the Bay of Bengal that is vulnerable to severe weather.
Dhaka’s response to the Rohingya displacement crisis is at an inflection point. If the Bangladeshi government continues to look at the situation through a short-term lens and falls into a pattern of heavy-handed responses to security challenges, the situation could become more fraught and dangerous for all concerned. In the absence of prospects for repatriation and longer-term planning, such a crackdown will only increase the refugees’ desperation. It could even make them more susceptible to recruitment into criminal or extremist networks, which would add to the security challenges Bangladesh faces.
There is another way forward. Rather than implementing the full suite of security measures it has proposed, it could scale back the most draconian, and instead focus on promoting genuine camp security by increasing a law enforcement presence and ensuring accountability for offenders. Rather than treating the Rohingya displacement crisis as a year-to-year problem, it could shift to a longer-term perspective and loosen restrictions on the activities that donors and humanitarian partners can undertake. Working together, Dhaka and its partners could mobilise resources and develop programs to build safer facilities, help refugees work toward a better future through education and livelihood opportunities, and support host communities. For their part, external partners can make clear to Bangladesh that if it makes this pivot, they will both continue to press Myanmar on repatriation – an essential goal that Dhaka’s domestic constituents want to continue seeing at the top of the agenda – and provide the funding and resources required to allow this approach to succeed.
Whether or not Dhaka publicly acknowledges it, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are likely to remain in Bangladesh for years to come. While the Bangladeshi government must consider the political implications of expressly recognising this probability, it should also consider the practical implications of failing to do so. The most promising path for responsibly managing the Rohingya displacement crisis requires the government to shift its sights to planning for the long term and looking to external partners for support in making those plans succeed. That is the path it should now take.
For the past four decades, Bangladesh has provided safe haven for Muslim Rohingya facing violence and persecution in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State. In 1978, around 200,000 Rohingya civilians crossed into Bangladesh to escape a violent Myanmar government operation aimed at rooting out illegal immigrants. In the early 1990s,about 2,50,000 ( roughly a quarter-million) refugees arrived in Bangladesh after the Myanmar military unleashed another wave of abuses. Most of the Rohingya who left Rakhine,State during these episodes eventually went home, though some stayed behind in the country that gave them shelter.
The number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh increased dramatically after late August 2017, when Myanmar security forces embarked on a campaign of terror in response to attacks by a militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), on Border Guard Police posts. In the space of several months nearly 750,000 Rohingya fled over the border, joining those who had sought refuge there during previous crises. Bangladesh’s southern Cox’s Bazar district now hosts around one million Rohingya, some 600,000 of whom live in the Kutupalong “mega-camp”, the largest refugee settlement in the world.2 Hosting a refugee population of this size would be an extraordinary burden for any country, but for a developing country like Bangladesh that has faced periodic political instability and conflict – including a two-decade insurgency in the Chittagong Hills Tracts region at the end of the last century– the strain is especially pronounced.
This report looks at the Bangladeshi government’s efforts to grapple with this new and greatly expanded Rohingya refugee crisis. In any such crisis, repatriation is the first and preferred option – but, for reasons laid out here, the current cohort of Rohingya refugees is unlikely to return to Myanmar any time soon. The report therefore suggests some ways in which the government can improve its crisis response in order to sustainably accommodate large numbers of Rohingya for some years to come. Yangon/Brussels, 27 December 2019
