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An Investigative EIA for Kutupalong Refugee Camp and Surroundings, Bangladesh
By Michael Honeth, Sara P. Cobacho, Helen M. Conlon and Consulting Team of University Centre of the Westfjords, Iceland.
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.
The Focus Area: Kutupalong — Cox’s Bazar is a district in the southern portion of Bangladesh, directly abutting Myanmar. As with Myanmar, the area has a sub-tropical climate and experiences three distinct seasons: the hot, cool, and rainy (monsoon) season. The camp and surrounding makeshift and expansion camps are close in proximity to both Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary and Himchari National Park, leading to fears of further encroachment on protected areas. Appendix I shows the locations of this wildlife sanctuary and national park in relation to the focus area of.
Kutupalong is one of two state-run refugee camps built in the Cox’s Bazar district of the Chittagong region of Bangladesh; Nayapara Refugee Camp, located further south, is the other.. Makeshift expansion settlements to the Kutupalong camp have grown rapidly since August 2017 due to the increased Rohingya exodus from Myanmar (Judah, 2017). With 34,000 inhabitants, the official Kutupalong camp is currently at capacity, and recent arrivals have been relegated to begging for basic supplies and creating crude shelters along the streets and makeshift areas; only 45% of the refugee population currently lives in adequate shelters (UN Children’s Fund, 2017).
Due to overpopulation and lack of adequate resources, refugees in these areas are heavily impacting the surrounding environment, which has in turn caused a hazardous, cyclical relationship as increased environmental degradation has threatened overall health and well-being of the refugee inhabitants (UN Children’s Fund, 2017). The distribution of Rohingya refugees within the focus area is shown in Appendix II. The influx of Rohingya has caused greater environmental and socio-economic stress in an already struggling, impoverished area due to improper waste management, deforestation, resource consumption, and increased pollution, among others. Recently, steps to merge Kutupalong and its peripheral camp together with the sprawling Balukhali camp will began in a 2,000-acre section of Cox’s Bazar (Beech, 2017; Devex, 2017); when completed, this new mega-camp will be the largest refugee camp in the world. This infrastructure in this area is shown in appendix III.
Legal and Institutional Framework — Environmental Pollution Control Ordinance (1977)
This ordinance was built upon the issues and guidelines identified in the 1970 Water Pollution Control Ordinance set for East Pakistan. This ordinance encompasses environmental pollution standards and mitigation for all of Bangladesh and expanded the 1970 ordinance definition of pollution to include that of the air, water, and soil (the 1970 ordinance dealt with pollution primarily as it related to water pollution).
National Environmental Policy (1992) — This policy sets multi-sector concerns and priorities for addressing national and regional environmental standards, including sustainable utilisation of natural resources. The main objectives of the policy are:
- Identify and manage activities and developments which impact the environment
- Sustainable and environmentally sound development
- Promote well-managed utilisation of natural resources
- Encourage lasting involvement with international environmental policies and treaties
- Improve measures to protect against natural disasters
Objectives — The Kutupalong refugee camp has grown by hundreds of thousands of refugees within the past few weeks. Satellite images show an expansion of almost 650 acres within three months, resulting in a refugee camp of approximately 917 acres. The growth areas are unofficial and within the makeshift and expansion camp, but the government of Bangladesh has designated an additional official growth area. Official and unofficial growth together accounts for a refugee camp of almost 2,000 acres or 4km2(UNHCR, 2017a). The unofficial makeshift camps receive little help from aid organisations due to insufficient infrastructure and a lack of supplies. This is causing a variety of environmental and land use issues (Mendoza, 2017a).
