Cox’s Bazar is the largest tourist center in Bangladesh, with the longest beach in the world –120 kilometers–. Around, surrounded by barbed wire, a complex of refugee camps that is also the largest in the world. It is inhabited by the Rohingya, Burma’s Muslim minority declared stateless who five years ago suffered an “attempted genocide”, as defined by the United Nations using this concept for the first time since the cases of Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (Bosnia, 1995). ).
Cox’s Bazar “is very impressive,” explains Natalia Torrent, recently returned from two years as coordinator of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the camps and representative of the NGO in Bangladesh.
“It is a megacity made of bamboo and plastic on a huge expanse of hills, with a couple of roads that are the arteries, and the rest are small paths. And people who move around. It is a city of almost a million people.”
In August 2017, when the Burmese military launched its ethnic cleansing operation, “our villages burned one after another,” says the testimony of a refugee collected by MSF. Bombs were being dropped from planes (…) One night, around 4 in the morning, bullets began to rain down. In the morning, we saw bodies floating in the canals.” There were systematic rapes of women, kidnappings, looting…
It had happened before, but not on this scale. In 1982, citizenship was withdrawn from the Rohingya and they became immigrants of Bengali origin, without rights, despite the fact that they had inhabited the territory of the current Burmese state of Arakan since the s. XVI. Locked up in ghettos, they fled in waves to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand… In 2015, a report by Queen Mary University of London warned that they were on the verge of genocide “orchestrated at the highest level of the State”.
The fact that the Rohingya went into armed struggle precipitated the Burmese army’s offensive, in the face of the manifest passivity of the Councilor of State, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. About 7,000 people (perhaps 10,000, it was said) perished in one month. The exodus to Bangladesh was about 700,000.
At Cox’s Bazar “30,000 people arrived from one day to the next,” explains Natalia Torrent. Doctors Without Borders has been around since the 1990s. Today it has “ten health structures and three hospitals” that include 70% of the beds in the immense refugee camp, deforested due to the use of firewood, subjected to typhoons during the monsoon and to fires in the dry season, as that of March 2021, “in which even a clinic was burned.”
The Rohingya have been trapped ever since. They have nowhere to go. Bangladesh is not a signatory country of the Convention on Refugees, so that “they have no rights, neither mobility, nor education nor employment”, which makes domestic violence proliferate – which increased with the pandemic of the covid, although it did not have a serious impact–, crime –such as the trafficking of amphetamines from Burma– or that “many times women have to sell food rations to be able to buy certain things”, explains Torrent. Not exactly generous rations provided by the World Food Program. It is a population assisted by UN agencies and a few NGOs, less and less due to the bureaucratic difficulties of working in Bangladesh.
To alleviate the saturation of Cox’s Bazar, the Government two years ago enabled the island of Bhasan (or Bhasan Char), with well-built structures, and moved 19,000 people. His plan is to bring another 81,000 when the monsoon ends in October. However, there has not been much transparency in the process, and some have described the island as “a prison”. UNHCR has said that anyone who goes there has to do so voluntarily.
Natalia Torrent stresses that “it is not a classic refugee crisis”, for which the UN does not coordinate efforts as would be normal, while Bangladesh “continues with its narrative that it is a temporary situation”. In 2017 and 2019, it signed repatriation agreements with Burma, but the Rohingya do not want to return, much less since the February 2021 coup. Some 600,000 Rohingya remain in the country, 148,000 of them displaced by violence.
Meanwhile, the Burmese military regime remains intractable. The British ambassador between 2002 and 2006, Vicky Bowman, was arrested yesterday along with her husband, a former Burmese political prisoner, for living at a different address than the one they have registered, which would be punished with up to five years of jail. It so happens that Great Britain made two announcements yesterday: new sanctions against companies linked to the military junta, referring to the attempted genocide of the Rohingya, and that the Government of London will take part in the case opened by the state of Gambia before the International Court of Justice, a case in which, when required, Aung San Suu Kyi sided with the genocide.
