[But Western aid officials said privately
that this was a charade. The Rohingya would not be returning to Myanmar anytime
soon, the aid officials said. But nobody was allowed to come out and say that,
because it could alienate Bangladesh, which clearly does not want to host the
refugees indefinitely but whose good will is needed right now.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman
 |
|
Rohingya
refugees after crossing the Naf River into Bangladesh, near the village
of
Shah Porir Dwip, in September. Credit
Sergey Ponomarev for
The New York Times
|
SHAH
PORIR DWIP, Bangladesh — A
skinny finger of water separates Bangladesh from Myanmar, and the other night a
group of men sat on the Bangladeshi side, peering into the darkness, wondering
what was left for them.
For these men, ethnic Rohingya Muslim
refugees from Myanmar, there is certainly nothing back across the water. Home
doesn’t exist anymore. Myanmar’s army wiped out their villages in August,
turning their houses, their mosques, their corrals, their grain stores, their
fields, even their trees into dunes of ash.
The muddy camps just inside Bangladesh, where
more than 600,000 Rohingya have since fled, provide no solution, either.
Officials from Bangladesh, a very crowded
country, insist that Myanmar must take the Rohingya back. But Myanmar’s
Buddhist majority drove them out in the first place, creating a climate of hate
that vilified the Rohingya as subhuman. Many people in Myanmar insist the
Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though Rohingya have
lived in Myanmar for hundreds of years.
Few ethnic groups on earth have been locked
into such hopeless logic, marooned on an international border, unwanted by
either side, weary, traumatized, desperately stateless, their very origins in
dispute.
“The Rohingya are the wretched of the earth,”
said Leonard Doyle, a spokesman for the International Organization for
Migration, the agency helping coordinate relief efforts. “Nobody wants them.
I’m talking about 7-year-olds who have witnessed their parents get their
throats slit who are standing in bare feet on the border right now, asking:
‘What’s going to happen to me?’”
Bangladesh and Myanmar have held rounds of
talks about what to do with the refugees, without any Rohingya representatives
present. Likewise, the United Nations recently convened a major event in Geneva
called the Pledging Conference for the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. Dozens of donor
nations and aid agencies were invited but no Rohingya refugees.
Many Rohingya now worry that without any
input from them, their fate is being sealed. It is clear where most would stand
if they were consulted.
“I will never go back to Myanmar,” said an
older Rohingya woman named Morjan who spends her days under a plastic sheet in
a camp. After her husband and son were slaughtered in front of her, she fled to
Bangladesh. “Better you kill us here,” she said.
Bangladeshi officials have circulated a draft
repatriation agreement, specifying how to verify that Rohingya refugees, many
of whom are illiterate and do not have a piece of paper to their name, are from
Myanmar. The proposal talks of a “first batch” of returnees and even mentions
logistics and transport.
But Western aid officials said privately that
this was a charade. The Rohingya would not be returning to Myanmar anytime
soon, the aid officials said. But nobody was allowed to come out and say that,
because it could alienate Bangladesh, which clearly does not want to host the
refugees indefinitely but whose good will is needed right now.
Further complicating things, analysts said,
was Myanmar stalling the efforts to help the Rohingya, hardly surprising
considering how this crisis started. Witnesses have described, in disturbing
detail, how Myanmar’s army burned down Rohingya village after Rohingya village,
terrorizing and massacring civilians — of any age, including infants — with one
apparent purpose: to erase the Rohingya from the landscape.
The violence is not even over. One Rohingya advocacy
group said this week that Rohingya homes were still being burned to the ground.
Each night here on the border, hundreds of
Rohingya keep arriving in fleets of wooden boats that float silently across the
mouth of the Naf River, the brackish waterway that separates the two countries.
A group of New York Times journalists waited
in the darkness alongside worried family members as a searchlight on the
Myanmar side swung back and forth, back and forth, an eerie metronome moving
across the gloom.
“How can we talk about repatriation?” asked
Tun Khin, one of the few Western-educated Rohingya representatives who have
been able to reach out to the international news media. “People are still
fleeing.”
Bangladesh now finds itself in an impossible
situation. One of Asia’s poorest countries, it is home to 160 million people —
half the population of the United States — squeezed into a space the size of
Iowa. The Rohingya refugees have taken over hillsides, chopped down countless
trees to build their shelters and put such a stress on the economy of
Bangladeshi border villages that prices have shot up threefold, angering
longstanding residents.
Facing international pressure to host the
refugees and some domestic pressure to push them out, Bangladesh’s prime
minister, Sheikh Hasina, has said that her country would continue to help the
refugees on humanitarian grounds but that Myanmar must “take their nationals
back.”
She has ordered the army to seal off roads
around the camps to make sure Rohingya do not start migrating to towns. Her
government has also decreed that Rohingya were not allowed to work or register
for local cellphone service.
With no way to support themselves, the
Rohingya refugees are completely dependent on aid. United Nations agencies such
as the World Food Program have been feeding them, while international and
Bangladeshi charities have provided medical care, plastic tarps, cooking pots
and other basics.
How long the Rohingya are expected to stay
will affect the next set of issues, including questions like whether Bangladesh
or outside groups should begin building schools for them.
Many Bangladeshis worry that the Rohingya are
perfect candidates to be radicalized — victims of anti-Muslim persecution who
are now idle and dispossessed. Retaliation is a theme for the Islamic State and
countless other Islamist militant groups, including the Rohingya group that
attacked the security forces in Myanmar on Aug. 25, the Arakhan Rohingya
Salvation Army.
“If they stay where they are living now,”
said Anup Kumar Chakma, a retired Bangladeshi Army officer, “the entire area
will become a fertile breeding ground.”
And not only fertile for terrorist
recruiters, but also for human traffickers, criminal gangs, prostitution rings
— anyone who preys on the vulnerable.
For Rohingya, the conditions in Bangladesh
are an uncomfortable echo of the apartheidlike system they were put under in
Myanmar, the result of a long campaign of marginalization and dehumanization.
For decades, the Rohingya have been pushed
around this shoulder area of Asia where the Indian subcontinent and the
Southeast Asian peninsula meet. Their lowly status and history of being
demonized allowed this latest crisis to happen, analysts say.
If the British had drawn the colonial border
between what is now Myanmar and Bangladesh a little farther east and south, as
Rohingya leaders had pleaded for after World War II, the biggest Rohingya areas
would have been become part of Bangladesh. That would have made sense in
several ways: the Rohingya are Muslim, like the vast majority of Bangladesh,
and their language and culture are very similar.
But scholars say that to appease the majority
Buddhists and get out of Myanmar as quickly as possible, the British decided to
follow the old borders of an extinct Buddhist kingdom. This kept the Rohingya
inside Myanmar, where most people are very different ethnically and religiously
from them.
Myanmar’s leaders steadily stripped away
their rights, making it extremely difficult for Rohingya to get a government
job or a passport, go to school or even be legally married. Government soldiers
preyed upon them; revered Buddhist monks openly called them insects and snakes.
All this, looking back on it, seems to have
been building up to August, when the Rohingya suffered the most comprehensive
assault on their existence.
According to dozens of witnesses and human
rights groups, after Rohingya militants attacked a string of police posts —
mostly using farm implements as weapons — government troops rounded up and
killed hundreds of Rohingya civilians, creating a panicked exodus.
Many poured into Shah Porir Dwip, a border
crossing and notorious smuggling den somewhat disguised by a collection of
scruffy tea shops. It lies just across the water from Myanmar. The air smells
heavy here, the odor of rotting fruit cutting through the salty breeze.
Each evening, Rohingya men sit on a crumbled
walkway near the beach, waiting for family members still trying to get out. By
9 p.m., the boats usually start arriving. Without a sound, they materialize
from the murk, rowing in from the Myanmar side, engines off, for stealth.
On a recent night, one of the heaviest,
hundreds of Rohingya refugees splashed out. Many were quiet, and some wept as
they waded ashore.
It was difficult to tell which men had
reunited with their families and which had to return to the camps alone.
In the darkness, walking slowly up the beach,
the group moved as one.
Reporting was contributed by Sergey Ponomarev
from Shah Porir Dwip, and by Julfikar Ali Manik and AKM Moinuddin from Dhaka,
Bangladesh.
Follow Jeffrey Gettleman on Twitter:
@gettleman.
