Caught in nowhere land: Survivors in Rohingya refugee camps detail their plight

The shop owners at Jhinuk Market on the sandy Laboni Beach in Cox's Bazaar are content and happy. They are in business. Around 40 shops are selling local artefacts, cotton and Jamdani sarees, stones, pearls and handmade crafts, from morning till late in the night. They thank the Rohingya refugees.

They are in high spirits as they are cashing in on the misery and the humanitarian crisis. The foreigners have started visiting their shops regularly and they are making moolahs.

"We are doing good business. Lots of foreigners, working for Rohingya refugees, are coming to these places," said Shahid, one of the shopkeepers at Jhinuk Market. Another shopkeeper, Anwar, said that many journalists and their teams, members of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and various non-government organisations have started frequenting their shops.

But, behind these happy faces, there is also bitterness towards Rohingya. On the question of allowing them to work in Bangladesh, Anwar says, "How can they work here? They are refugees. They are not good people to be employed."

Just 46 kilometres away from the high-rise buildings and the bustling beach town, there is a Rohingya camp — known as Kutupalong-Balukhali settlements — which houses around 11 lakh refugees.

"They live there just to survive. Our priority is to make them survive. They are not allowed to work. They are refugees and it is our duty to provide them shelter and food," said Major Mamun of 34 Battalion of the Border Guards of Bangladesh (BGB). The officer and his team were deployed at the border and have seen hundreds of bodies flow through the Naf River every day during the initial days of influx. "Nobody could count how many bodies came through the water," he said.

Contained in camps

The refugees live in camps spread across 12 kilometres. They are not allowed to go outside to work or for any other reason. They are not allowed to even interact with local people. They are contained in camps as security agencies apprehend that they can easily mix with the local crowd and will perhaps become untraceable henceforth. A few instances of refugees missing from the camps resulted in the security personnel setting up various check posts in these areas.

Now, they live in camps where bare minimum facilities have been provided to them. The UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) provide basic food and sanitation to these people. Initially, the Bangladesh government had given these refugees the supplies they needed, but later, international organisations and the United Nations took over.

The camps comprise thousands of small huts made of thatched roof and wooden walls. Winds with a minimum speed of 30 kilometres can easily blow away these huts. Torrential rains are the worst.

A family of six or seven live in a hut. They take turns to sleep.

There is no electricity and at night, no visibility. "Forget electricity. Our priority is to stop an epidemic. The camps have been set up in areas which were earlier hardly frequented by Bangladeshi people. It was a very remote forest and a hilly area wherein wild animals, including elephants, were living," the officer said.

(*Figures are for refugees in camps as at April 12, 2018 *Source: Inter Sector Co-ordination Group)

No space for fundamentalists

Many babies are born in these camps, and many refugees die, too. On an average, five to eight people die because of natural causes and around six to seven babies take birth in these camps. Their survival is based on the subsistence provided by the UN and the non-government organisations. Tonnes and thousands of relief materials are being provided by various countries, especially Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But they are no more being directly given to these people. Everything is being routed through the BGB.

The government of Bangladesh leapt into action after the local police and the BGB found that a few organisations, with links to terror groups, tried to make recruit these refugees for carrying out nefarious activities.

"We identified few such organisations and banned them immediately. They all were deported within few hours from our country. Now there is no such organisation working with Rohingya," Brigadier General SM Rakibullah, Regional Commander of BGB COX'S Bazar Region, said. But, for how long can one contain such things, he questioned. "They are poor, unemployed, and tortured. Isn't it sufficient ground for them to fall into a trap of fundamentalism? We need to find a solution to this problem on an immediate basis," Rakibullah said.

How it unfolded

Currently, more than 11.5 lakh of Rohingya are living in the camps. Around 7.5 lakh people took shelter in the territory of Bangladesh in four days after the noon of August 25, 2017.

The Myanmar security forces and allied mobs, on August 25, 2017, killed and burnt hundreds of Rohingya villages in Myanmar. It was in retaliation to Rohingya militants who had staged attacks against the government forces a few days before that.

In the coming days after August 25, many Rohingya were brutally killed. Kids and senior citizens were also not spared by the army of Bangladesh's neighbouring country Myanmar, claimed Rakibullah.

When the influx started, Lt. Colonel Manjurul Hassan of BGB, was deployed at the Gumdhum border post, just 150 yards from the six-foot barbed fences of the Myanmar border. He witnessed the coming mayhem.

"On 25 August, I was standing here (Gumdhum border). There was massive firing across the border a day before that (August 24). Gunshots from automatics machine guns were heard. It is not a usual thing at the border. We fire one or two single shots to scare away the smugglers or wild animals. But when there is massive firing, things are much more serious," he said.

In the south, there is the Naf river, and up in north are the hills.

"It was daylight. I saw from the post that few Myanmaris were trying to cross the border into Bangladesh from the south. I rushed there and found that around 100 people were climbing the barbed fences standing on each other and jumping onto our side. My soldiers went to talk to them. We also engaged some local people to speak to them. When we asked them the reason, they only said one thing: 'The army has entered our village and they are firing indiscriminately. We have to save our lives'. They assured us that they will return within a few hours," Hassan said. He further pointed out at 12 noon, he again heard loud gunshots and motor shell shots on the opposite side of the hill.

"It was no less than a battlefield. We got prepared to strike as the noise seemed closer to the border this time," he confessed.

However, around 1 am, he saw a sea of innocent civilians running towards them from across the border. He ordered his men to form two teams - one for a counter attack, just in case, and another to stop those people from crossing the border.

But, as soon as he saw that hundreds of Rohingya were climbing over the barbed fence, trying to save their lives, it was unbelievable, he recollects.

"The situation was difficult. I am a military personnel. Civilians were everywhere. We were armed and so were the army men on the other side of the border. However, they were firing at their own countrymen who were trying to save their lives by trying to cross over into my country. It was a very complex and a critical situation," he said.

The officer said he is duty-bound to protect his country and to stop illegal entry into his country. "I was in a terrible position. When I heard a one of the Rohingya refugee begging us to allow them to stay for a few hours, I took the decision of allowing them to stay within 150 yards of the International border," he said, adding that the morning, the whole world had woken up to the news of Rohingya persecution by their own country.

It started raining in the evening the next day (August 26) and things became worst. "We saw a pregnant woman delivering a baby in an open field of Bangladesh. We saw a woman carrying a three-day-old baby and struggling to cross the barbed fences during heavy rainfall, and begging us to save them," he said.

"Please allow us, please save us," the woman had said.