Rohingya Refugee Crisis

    Rohingya Refugee Crisis

What is the Rohingya crisis? 

When hundreds of thousands of terrified Rohingya refugees began flooding onto the beaches and paddy fields of southern Bangladesh in August 2017, it was the children who caught many people’s attention. As the refugees – almost 60 per cent of whom were children – poured across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh, they brought with them accounts of the unspeakable violence and brutality that had forced them to flee.

By July 2019, around 910,000 Rohingya had settled in Cox’s Bazar District, in southern Bangladesh. Those fleeing attacks and violence in that exodus joined around 300,000 people already in Bangladesh from previous waves of displacement, effectively forming the world’s largest refugee camp.

Bangladesh today hosts the biggest refugee camp in the world. It became so suddenly and brutally. The flow of refugees was not a trickle but like a monsoon flood. Unlike many countries of the world, we rose to the occasion. It was with the warmest of hearts and deepest empathy for human suffering that we welcomed nearly a million Rohingya refugees. That warmth of heart is on the wane though our empathy remains just as deep. This change came gradually as we saw no end to the problem in sight. The latest instance of the mockery of an exercise at repatriation came as a rude shock. Anybody with the slightest of knowledge of the ground reality appears to have known that it would not work and yet all went through the ritual as if it was a game.

The Rohingya people have faced decades of systematic discrimination, statelessness and targeted violence in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Such persecution has forced Rohingya women, girls, boys and men into Bangladesh for many years, with significant spikes following violent attacks in 1978, 1991-1992, and again in 2016. Yet it was August 2017 that triggered by far the largest and fastest refugee influx into Bangladesh. Since then, an estimated 745,000 Rohingya—including more than 400,000 children—have fled into Cox’s Bazar.