Rohingya pour into Bangladesh where tents stretch for kilometres

[Banglar Bir]

Rohingya pour into Bangladesh where tents stretch for kilometres
Thousands live in poor conditions near UN camps as aid agencies struggle to cope with the influx of refugees.
Divya Gopalan
Divya Gopalan is an Emmy nominee, international news anchor and correspondent for Al Jazeera English.

Kutapalong, Cox's Bazar - Everywhere you look, there are heartbreaking scenes.
A five-year-old sheltering his little brother from the rain; a little girl with only a skirt and no blouse; a baby chewing his hand because he is so hungry and cannot cry any more; and a grandmother sobbing because she has outlived most of her children and grandchildren.
Well before the Rohingya Muslims started arriving in Kutapalong in late August, the United Nations camps in the area were full to the brim.

THE STREAM: Who will save the Rohingya?
The men, women and children fleeing violence in Myanmar were forced to put up tents outside, lining the streets to the settlement.
Now, three weeks later, the makeshift shelters stretch for kilometres.

More than 270,000 Rohingya, a large percent of them women and children, have fled to Bangladesh in the last two weeks [Divya Gopalan/Al Jazeera]
'No idea where we'll go'
When we arrived at the camp, just a short distance away from the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, a truck carrying mostly women and children stopped in front of us.

I counted five babies under the age of one.
This was the end of a five-day journey to safety.

We met a family that had just arrived the previous day. They managed to set up in a half-constructed shop - three walls and no roof, but at least it wasn't in the mud.

A woman was cooking their meal for the day, a few handfuls of rice over an open fire. She told us the group fled after their village was burned down, but her husband and son died before they could escape.

But she told us she could not think of that now.
"We need food for the children," she said. "We have no idea where we will go from here, we are just following what everyone else is doing."

The UN says an "alarming" number of refugees have come into Bangladesh in the past two weeks. But the conditions they come into are also alarming.

READ MORE: Rohingya warn of 'another Srebrenica' if violence rages
Most do not have food or shelter; children run around half-naked; adults barefoot - all in torn clothes that tell the tale of their journey.

Families mark out any space they can with whatever they can find: pieces of tarpaulin, broken umbrellas, bits of plastic.

We spoke to a man putting up a tent using bamboo poles and plastic sheets. He said he bought them from a nearby market with money borrowed from a relative at the camp.

The Rohingya are widely reviled as illegal migrants from Bangladesh, despite having lived in Myanmar for generations [Divya Gopalan/Al Jazeera]
As we left, the rain started pouring, those with tents or cover made way for families and little children.

They all squeezed into the makeshift shelters, without an inch to spare, watching the rain come down.
Those with bottles or containers started collecting the rainwater, gulping it down as soon as they had enough to drink, then passing it around.
This is the only clean water they'll be getting.

Aid agencies say they do not have enough food or provisions, cautioning that it is just a matter of time before there is an outbreak of disease given the conditions the refugees are staying in - a warning that the worst of their journey may not be over.
AL JAZEERA WORLD: The Rohingya: Silent Abuse (45:33)
Source: Al Jazeera News
http://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/asia...tents-stretch-kilometres-170908143536507.html

 

[Post Colonnial]

Sad. I hope India and BD can pull together some sort of humanitarian assistance program for these people.

 

[Banglar Bir]

What will happen to the Rohingya children?
Abu Siddique
Published at 06:36 PM September 09, 2017

The refugee children are in danger because of lack of food, shelter and health support Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune
Many of these families had to travel by foot for more than 10 days and have children who fell seriously ill on the way

There is no stopping baby Aysha from crying when she awakens and falls asleep again without being fed. Her mother Hafiza does not even get to eat one meal a day. Naturally, she is unable to provide her newborn with enough breast milk.
Hafiza said: “My daughter is crying for milk, but what can I do?”

The 20-year-old mother sat helpless inside a tiny makeshift tent at the Amtoli shelter in Ukhiya upazila.

Aysha was born just three days ago, last Wednesday, at the no man’s land near Teknaf.
Hafiza and her husband Ali Johor managed to cross over into Bangladesh and find the shelter at Amtoli the next day, but they have had hardly anything to eat since then.

“Our lives were saved after coming here, but we don’t know how the life of our only child can be saved from hunger,” she cried out.
Also Read – By the time the world stands up Myanmar will have gotten rid of all Rohingya
Like Aysha, hundreds of Rohingya children are suffering from hunger at the makeshift shelters set up on the hill slopes of Amtoli.

On the run since the recent escalation of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, most of the refugees have failed to bring any provisions with them.

In fact, many of them have yet to find any shelter. They spend their days and nights under the open sky at many spots beside the Cox’s Bazar-Teknaf highway.

Many of these families had to travel by foot for more than 10 days and have children who fell seriously ill on the way.
Mohammad Taha is one such child. The one-year-old has been suffering from pneumonia for the last seven days.

His mother, Chemon Ara, told the Dhaka Tribune: “I have been sitting inside the tent doing little else but holding my only son in my lap. My family members have taken food only twice in the last two days. How can I arrange for his treatment in such a condition?”

According to the UNHCR, at least 270,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in the last two weeks. Of them, 80% are women and children.

UNHCR spokesperson Vivian Tan told the Dhaka Tribune: “Though we don’t have the head count, we think that the number of children among the refugees is huge. All of them are in danger because of lack of food, shelter and health support.”

Unicef Communication Manager Sakil Faizullah has said: “The volume of support is very scarce compared to what they need.”

“If we fail to provide them with adequate health and food support, there is a great possibility that we may have to deal with a health catastrophe in the entire area,” he added.
http://www.dhakatribune.com/world/south-asia/2017/09/09/what-will-happen-rohingya-children/

2:00 AM, September 10, 2017 / LAST MODIFIED: 03:29 AM, September 10, 2017
Struggling to cope with the surge
Govt, aid agencies strain to ensure food, shelter for so many people; coordination a huge challenge; UN body says $77.1m needed for life-saving services

Rohingya refugees gather for relief at Hoaikong in Teknaf upazila of Cox's Bazar yesterday. Some private organisations brought aid to them. The refugees have been living in makeshift houses in the area since they fled violence in Myanmar's Rakhine State several days ago. Photo: Anisur Rahman
Porimol Palma and Mohammad Ali Jinnat

Amid a shortage of resources, the authorities are struggling to provide water, food, medicine, shelter and other basic needs to the huge number of Rohingyas streaming into Bangladesh from Myanmar every day.

The Bangladesh government, UN agencies and NGOs are also facing challenges in coordinating their activities for the newly arriving Rohingyas who are taking refuge anywhere they can -- roadsides, cropland, hills -- in Ukhia, Teknaf and Naikyangchhari.

Many are living right under the open sky.
“This is a complex and chaotic situation. We are trying to provide services on a priority basis. But that is nowhere near enough,” a UN official in Cox's Bazar told The Daily Star yesterday.

It is almost impossible to manage food, shelter and medicine for so many people over such a short period, he said.
The official feared that the Rohingya influx would continue.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) yesterday said around 290,000 Rohingyas came to Bangladesh in 14 days since August 26.

It happened after the Myanmar security forces began a crackdown against the minority group in response to alleged attacks by Rohingya insurgents.
The new arrivals join the already nearly five lakh Rohingyas, who came to Bangladesh between 1978 and 2016.

Every day, thousands of Rohingyas, mostly women and children, are seen sitting by the Cox's Bazar-Teknaf road in Ukhia and Teknaf, irrespective of the sun and rain.

Abdul Mannan, 50, who along with his 12-member family crossed into Bangladesh on September 5 following a five-day journey from Maungdaw in Rakhine, said they had not found any shelter yet and that they were looking for some food.

“We ate some food on Friday afternoon. We are sitting here hoping that somebody would come and give us some food,” he told this correspondent around 2:00pm yesterday in Ukhia.

Noyna Khatun, 60, who took shelter at Bagguna hill in Ukhia along with her 18 family members, said they bought a little food with all the money they had managed to bring from their home. However, they already ate that.

“I got two kg rice from a family and cooked it this morning. We had a meal only with salt and chilly,” she said yesterday and added that she had no idea how they would survive.

“We are drinking water from a nearby pond,” said the woman who knew the water may cause diseases.

The IOM, UN Refugee Agency, World Food Programme, Unicef, Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger are some of the leading agencies working with the government and other NGOs to provide life-saving services to the Rohingyas.

These agencies have a coordination mechanism to provide services in the registered Rohingya camps in Kutupalong and Nayapara and unregistered camps set up in 2012 and 2016. They also began providing the same to the new arrivals, but at a scale much lower than that is required.

Before August 26, Action Against Hunger used to provide lunch and biscuits to around 1,000 people a day, but now it is providing the food to nearly 20,000 people a day in Ukhia and Teknaf, said the organisation's coordinator in Cox's Bazar, Mohammad Mahadi.
“This is not enough at all,” he said.

The World Food Programme has been arranging food for the refugees in the registered Rohingya camps, but now it is also arranging food for the new arrivals taking shelter in the registered camps, an official of Kutupalong Registered Rohingya camp said.

The IOM in partnership with other NGOs is supplying some food and other relief materials to the makeshift camps, but that's negligible in comparison to the need, the official said.

The organisation in a statement said many people have set up camps in areas, which are too far from established support centres to receive help. Most families are living in the open, in the rain, with children and the elderly at particularly high risk of getting sick, it added.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its teams are seeing streams of people arriving destitute and extremely traumatised. Many of the arrivals have serious medical needs, such as violence-related injuries, severely infected wounds, and advanced obstetric complications.

“Without a scale-up of humanitarian support, the potential health risks are extremely concerning,” said Pavlo Kolovos, MSF head of mission in Bangladesh.
“We've not had something on this scale here in many years.”

Rohingya children disembarking from a dinghy in no man's land in Lamba Beel, a canal connected to the Naf river, in Teknaf yesterday. Photo: Anisur Rahman
Shah Kamal, secretary of the disaster management and relief ministry, said as the Rohingyas were staying in a scattered manner, it was difficult for the authorities to provide them with relief materials.

“It will create a huge problem if the situation remained unchanged,” he told The Daily Star yesterday, adding that the government was working on ways to put all the unregistered Rohingya to a specified area in Kutupalong.

Meanwhile, Disaster Management and Relief Minister Mofazzal Hossain Chowdhury Maya yesterday said Rohingyas coming from Myanmar would be documented under the biometric system, reports BSS.

The minister made the comment while exchanging views with journalists after visiting the Nayapara Refugee Camp.

UN AGENCIES SEEKING FUND
The IOM said $77.1 million were required to provide lifesaving services to the end of 2017 for an influx of up to 300,000 people.

The World Food Programme said it needed $11.3 million to support the new influx of people arriving, in addition to those already living in camps.

Secretary Shah Kamal said the disaster management ministry had already allocated Tk 10 lakh for relief materials for the Rohingyas.

Asked if the government would appeal to the international community for fund, he said the disaster management ministry would soon hold a meeting with different UN agencies and NGOs to discuss the funding issue.

Meanwhile, the Danish government has allocated Tk 256 million to United Nations World Food Programme as relief aid for the newly-arrived Rohingya refugees.

Ulla Tornaes, the Danish Minister for Development Cooperation, expressed grave concern about the situation in Rakhine and condemned the violence against the Rohingyas in Myanmar, said a press release issued yesterday, reports UNB.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Friday said in New York that UN agencies stepped up efforts to provide aid to refugees in Bangladesh.

Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told a briefing in New York that the UN and its partners in Bangladesh had developed a plan to help up to 3,00,000 people by providing them with food, shelter, water, health care and other services until the end of the year.

The UN Resident Coordinator in Bangladesh, Robert Watkins, said, “With the movement of people showing no signs of stopping, it is vital that agencies working in Cox's Bazar have the resources they need to provide emergency assistance to incredibly vulnerable people who have been forced to flee their homes and have arrived in Bangladesh with nothing.”

MALAYSIAN RELIEF
A Malaysian aircraft carrying relief materials for Rohingyas landed at Chittagong Shah Amanat International Airport yesterday afternoon.
Deputy Commissioner of Chittagong Zillur Rahman Chowdhury received the relief materials from Malaysian officials.

Contacted, the DC said around 12 tonnes of relief materials, including three tonnes of rice, dates, medicines, towel, soap and shampoos were received.

Earlier, talking to local journalists, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak yesterday announced that his country would do all it can to help alleviate the escalating Rohingya refugee crisis, reports Malaysian The Star online.

CONTROL ROOM
The Cox's Bazar district administration yesterday opened a control room to monitor the relief operations for the Rohingyas.

“The control room will enhance efficiency in collecting and distributing the relief materials,” said Mohammad Ali Hossain, deputy commissioner of Cox's Bazar.

The control room was introduced as different organisations and communities were running relief operations for the refugees separately.

Anyone wishing to donate relief materials can contact the control room at +88 01615700900.
http://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/struggling-cope-refugee-surge-1459843

 

[Banglar Bir]

Awaiting the awakening
by Saira Rahman Khan | Published: 00:05, Sep 10,2017 | Updated: 22:51, Sep 09,2017

PICTURE a country that contains people of various ethnicities, cultures and beliefs. In today’s world, that could mean any country on the map. Now put in place people in power, position and influence, who begin to target and harm a particular group of people because of their ‘difference’ in faith and ethnicity. If you were in a time machine, you could zip across decades and end up in Germany, Yugoslavia, Rawanda or Bangladesh. However, the large-scale ethnic tension and acts of genocide in these countries have concluded long ago
.
Human rights and human dignity have, to a large extent, been recognised and restored. Those who were excluded and persecuted are now citizens of independent states, with all rights that come with such status. When the international community stood up against the persecution and genocide all those years ago, they stood against human rights abuses, regardless of the race, gender or belief of the persecuted. How things have changed! The largely western call for ‘war against terrorism’ — targeting so-called Muslims — have made almost all adherents of Islam potential trouble-makers. This has also affected refugees seeking safe haven from war and persecution.

It must not be forgotten that the modern system of human rights and the United Nations were established after a war that saw genocide perpetrated on people of a specific religion. Why should things be any different now? We do not need another war. That should always be a last resort and will cause further violations. What we need is a concerted effort from everyone to restore human rights and human dignity to the Rohingya people and ensure that they get justice at the international level, because it is all too obvious that their own country is doing absolutely nothing to help them. The first rule of human rights is that there must be no discrimination.

There are two sides to the issues of the rights of the Rohingya people — the country trying to wipe them out of existence through ethnic cleansing and the nearest country where they feel they could get refuge — however sparse. Reports show that more than 1,64,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar and are seeking refuge along the Bangladesh border, fleeing persecution, rape and death. And this in a span of two weeks. Bangladesh has been playing benevolent host to Rohingya refugees since the 1970s and is near the end of its tether.

It is beyond high time that the international community stepped in, not only to assist in the humanitarian efforts to assist the Rohingyas but also to take stringent measures to cease the diabolical policies of the Myanmar government so that the Rohingyas are finally given recognition and all the rights and dignity that come with being a citizen of a state. Yes. It will be a Herculean task most probably akin to cleaning the Aegean stables. But it must be done now — since not only Rohingya Muslims but others too are now being targeted and attempts at retaliation are being labelled as ‘insurgency’ and have become an excuse for the government to perpetrate further violence to show the international community that they are ‘handling’ the situation.

In the past two weeks, the media have been flooded with news of what the Rohingya have been facing in Myanmar. Homes are being torched, villages emptied, women and children raped and, of course, the torture and death. A close friend and human rights defender who returned from the border recently had spoken to many Rohingya who had taken shelter in the border. A mother had fled with her daughters, leaving her son behind. Her fear of rape was genuine. She said that her son could fend for himself, but her daughters would surely be raped. There were children everywhere, crying and looking for their parents who had had to flee leaving them behind. Or who were dead. There were parents who did not know where their children were.

In February 2017, a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and statements by the UN special rapporteur on Myanmar referred to reports of violations targeting the Rohingya minority at the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 — including the deliberate killing of children, the burning of homes with people inside them, rape, and sexual violence. The OHCHR report concluded that reports coming from Myanmar indicate the very likely commission of crimes against humanity. A total of 204 people were interviewed by the UN human rights team for this report. Of them, almost a half had reported family members who had been killed or who had gone missing. Of the 101 women interviewed, more than half were either victims of rape rape or some form of sexual abuse. The information in the full report and the witness statements therein are enough to jump-start ways to pressure the Myanmar government into opening up for further investigation and the need for sanctions. But we are still waiting.

What the Myanmar government is and has been doing to the Rohingya people is beyond inexcusable. It is barbaric and inhumane. The levels of violence, neglect, disgust, distrust, repression and alienation faced by the Rohingya is something no human being should have to suffer, especially in the country where they were born and have lived long enough to establish it as their homeland. They are not recognised as belonging to Myanmar, they have no citizenship and, obviously, have no state protection. I met two highly educated Burmese women in Europe in 2015, who were doing their postgraduate studies on a European scholarship. When I questioned them about the Rohingya, they both explained to me that ‘everyone knew’ the Rohingya were actually from Bangladesh and were committing criminal activities and terrorism in Myanmar.

When I asked them how it was then possible that Rohingya people were living in parts of Myanmar for generations, the two ladies had ‘difficulty’ in understanding English and could not explain. The discrimination against the Rohingya seems also to be a social issue. This is a violation on a very wide public scale and is known worldwide. The government of Bangladesh needs to bring the issue to the international forum on an urgent basis. It needs to shock the international community into taking action. The fact that the Myanmar has recently refused to allow international visitors in to investigate and the harrowing experiences that we in Bangladesh hear from the refugees seems to be enough evidence to impose stringent sanctions on Myanmar. When a known repressive government blames ‘insurgents’, the international community needs to find out why the insurgents were created in the first place.

Bangladesh has been playing host to Rohingya refugees since the 1970s even though it is not a party to the Refugee Convention. So, what makes it obliged to shelter these non-citizens to the best of its ability? The fact that they are Muslims? The fact that they speak a similar sounding dialect? No. Bangladesh has an obligation to afford them shelter and a safe refuge because they are humans. The fact that they are humans has been forgotten by the Myanmar government. We in Bangladesh must remind them. In 1971, thousands of Bengalis found themselves refugees, fleeing persecution from a military government that not only saw them as ‘inferior’ but who also refused to hand over power to an elected government dominated by the Bengalis. During the war of liberation, ‘inferior’ Bengalis became victims of genocide and rape. As a nation, we feel the frustration, fear and anger of the Rohingyas. All along the border, Bangladeshis are helping in any way they can. An old woman saw a Rohingy family cooking rice in a field. They had nothing else. She offered them some salt — it was all she had to give. But this and many more are personal, individual endeavours that have limits. Our government needs to now make this an international humanitarian issue.

People of Bangladesh can no longer deal with this crisis alone. However, the government cannot call for the Myanmar government to take back the Rohingya without any safeguards and measures in place. It is obvious the latter do not want them. Pushing them back into Myanmar breaches human rights and international law. Bangladesh and other countries where the Rohingya are fleeing still have the obligation to afford them shelter. They cannot push them back into a country where they know they will face persecution and ethnic cleansing and their life will be at risk.

Under human rights norms, state obligations can be broadly categorised into positive and negative obligations — the obligation to do something and the obligation not to do something. Probably the most fundamental negative obligation is the duty not to harm others — regardless of whether they are your citizens or not. This obligation prevents states, such as Bangladesh, from pushing the Rohingyas back into the territory of Myanmar, where it is obvious that they will become victims of the ethnic cleansing. The providing of shelter and other rights such as food, education and effective sanitation comes from the obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Social, Economic and Cultural Rights — the holy trinity of human rights instruments. Because of the obligations contained in these, a state cannot declare that it has no obligations to house refugees as it is not a party to the convention protecting refugee rights.
It is, in fact, the responsibility of the international community to host the persecuted Rohingya people till conditions are in place for their safe return.

Bangladesh, in this respect, can play the role of an interim host. The Myanmar government must not be allowed to think that this is a comfortable or permanent ‘arrangement’. However, although some assistance is given to Bangladesh to look after the Rohingya refugees, little is being done to pressure Myanmar into taking back its people with the guarantee that they will be given the status of Myanmar citizens with all the rights citizens have. The Myanmar government must immediately stop its ethnic cleansing of Rohingya people and recognise them as citizens of Myanmar, with full rights. They cannot deny the very existence of the Rohingyas in Myanmar as it is historically proved that they have been living there for generations.

The Rohingyas are the main targets of the Myanmar government. In its diabolical action to wipe Rohingyas off the map, others who are not Rohingyas are being caught in the violence. Every action has a reaction and in this, others may be harmed. However, using innocent victims to fuel the fire that Rohingyas are to blame for their suffering is just another part of the master plan. The world must never forget that this is ethnic cleansing.

Stopping it will also stop others from being harmed too. However, till the international community wakes up to this fact and looks at the matter holistically and not just at a ‘personal’ level, the establishment of a ‘safe zone’ within Rakhine State of Myanmar under the supervision of the United Nations has become imperative, with security provided by UN peacekeepers, order to give the persecuted and fleeing Rohingya basic human rights of shelter, food, security and dignity — not as Muslims but as human beings.

Saira Rahman Khan teaches law at BRAC University.
http://www.newagebd.net/article/23682/awaiting-the-awakening