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Saturday, May 11, 2019

The accidental city: For scores of Rohingya refugees, a safe camp is hardly a home

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Nathan VanderKlippe Asia correspondent
COX’S BAZAR, BANGLADESH
Published May 11, 2019

Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Myanmar are busy setting up their lives in a corner of Bangladesh. They have escaped brutal repression and any talk of being repatriated is dismissed: the Rohingya simply do not trust the regime in the country they fled. But no one knows where they will settle for good, and finding hope for the future feels impossible for many. Photography by Mohammad Ponir Hossain .

Aid workers fear that Rohingya camps near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, will become like a tiny, crowded Gaza: where refugees tainted by discontent and violence live within high fences indefinitely. MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail
 
 
Not far from the waters of the Bay of Bengal, Taiyeba begins work at 3 a.m. She arrives with her two daughters, 9 and 12, who work near her, arranging fish to dry on low wooden racks. The three of them will work until 4 p.m., earning a total of $14.27 for their labours, while the rest of the family – four other children, all younger – stay at home.

Ms. Taiyeba, 35, lost her husband in 2017, in the murderous violence in Myanmar that killed thousands of Rohingya, a largely Muslim group treated as invaders in the country they considered home, and drove many more to seek refuge in next-door Bangladesh. The approximately 910,000 Rohingya in Bangladesh camps now form the most concentrated population of refugees anywhere on Earth.

But Ms. Taiyeba lasted only a few months in the crowded camps and their hilly warrens of narrow pathways where her children sometimes got lost, and where many Rohingya survive on aid rations of lentils, rice and oil. When her children began begging for something better to eat, she gathered them up and left, sneaking past the military check stops meant to keep people such as them inside.

“I was not able to feed them there,” she says.
Widowed mother of six Taiyeba works in a dry fish yard for long hours each day, but couldn’t bear the conditions or rations in the refugee camps for Rohingya. Instead her family dodges authorities in a nearby seaside town. MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail
 
Shamsunnahar, age 12, works alongside her mother drying fish. 
MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail

The family now lives in nearby Cox’s Bazar, a busy seaside town roughly 40 kilometres northwest of the camps. It is a hardscrabble life, made doubly so by the fact they have no legal right to be here. Ms. Taiyeba lives with the constant threat that authorities will discover her and toss her back into a camp – there are, officially, 34 of them – with the hundreds of thousands of others who are waiting in hopes they can one day reclaim land and a future in the country where they were born.

But it’s a life, in uncertain circumstances, that Ms. Taiyeba has herself chosen. “I don’t want to go back to Myanmar,” she says. “My husband was killed there. If we go back, they will kill us again.”

Bangladesh is not yet home. But it has become the place where she wants to stay, a desire that puts her and many others at odds with official rhetoric calling for a speedy Rohingya return to Myanmar – even as the reality in Bangladesh, both inside and outside the camps, points to preparations under way for a lengthy stay here.

Among the government officials and foreign agencies that run the Rohingya settlements, few are willing to so much as utter the word “permanent.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees insists that the Rohingya camps remain far from stable. “We should not become complacent that the emergency phase is over,” says Steven Corliss, the UNHCR’s country representative in Bangladesh. The best solution, he adds, remains “voluntary repatriation to Myanmar.”

 
john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: UNHCR; qgis; TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP; reuters; graphic news

Bangladeshi officials, meanwhile, have repeatedly said they intend to send refugees back to Myanmar as soon as possible, and few among those working here – foreign-aid workers, diplomats, local humanitarians – are eager to openly question Bangladeshi policy for fear of contradicting a government that has in many ways rolled out an extraordinary welcome mat for the Rohingya.

Government leaders in Dhaka and refugee authorities alike are also loath to send a signal that the Rohingya are here for the foreseeable future. Such a message risks assuring regimes around the world, Myanmar included, that it is possible to evict large numbers of people without consequence.

Bangladeshi leaders continue to pursue the “voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable repatriation” of Rohingya to their homes – though many of those structures have been reduced to ash. Earlier this week, Myanmar agreed to extend a memorandum of understanding with several UN agencies toward the return of Rohingya, which had been expected to begin as early as 15 months ago. There is little sign of progress. Some observers are now raising the creation of guarded “safe zones” inside Myanmar as an alternative.

But there has been little public discussion of solutions such as opening the doors to Rohingya in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million that, numerically at least, seems capable of accommodating their numbers without being overwhelmed. (Although that, too, is hardly an idea without flaws: Dispersing Rohingya throughout Bangladesh risks their cultural extinguishment.)

At the same time, aid workers privately worry about the camps themselves becoming a tiny, more populous Gaza Strip, surrounded by high fences for the long-term detention of a people at risk of being tainted by discontent and violence. In the areas surrounding the camps, unease is rising among Bangladeshis who fear that Rohingya are seizing jobs, depressing wage rates and bringing crime, even as the government of Bangladesh is pressing forward plans to move large numbers of Rohingya to an offshore island.

Inside the check stops that ring the refugee settlements, meanwhile, a shift is already under way to build for years to come, as workers install the foundations – often in literal terms – for a lengthy stay by Rohingya on the muddy, deforested hills that have become their homes.


Nor Halima, 18, came to the Chakmarkul camp from india. 
MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail

In some places, technicians are stringing electrical wires to government administration buildings constructed with concrete and glass. Crews are surfacing dozens of kilometres of dirt road with brick and concrete. Children play on metal playgrounds. Aid organizations are designing more robust homes for refugees, starting with treated bamboo that doesn’t rot and require replacement every year, with an eye toward installing sturdier concrete corner posts at a cost of roughly $1,300 a home. With some 210,000 homes in the camps, the potential cost is enormous. (The budget for operating the camps this year alone is estimated at US$920-million.)

But “there’s been a change in thinking to use more concrete and brick,” says Peter Guest, emergency co-ordinator for the Rohingya Refugee Response that the World Food Programme is administering in Cox’s Bazar. “Last year, it was all sandbags and bamboo. Nowadays, there’s a degree of permanence.”

Planners, he says, need to “start thinking like it’s a city.”

The tension in how best to reckon for the future resides partly in the complicated administration of the Rohingya refugees, a group whose care is largely funded by foreign countries – Canada included, with more than $68-million in contributions to date – and administered by international organizations. But the camps, on Bangladeshi soil, fall under the governance of a developing country whose own domestic difficulties are not inconsequential.

Dhaka sets the rules, and they are strict: Rohingya, whom the government here formally refers to as “Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals,”cannot work. They cannot open bank accounts. They cannot leave camp. Children cannot study in the Bengali language. Adults, according to the strictest readings of the rules, should not even possess a cellphone in camp.

Beneath the restrictions lies logic. Rohingya refugees are not Bangladeshis and, government officials say, they should not begin the process of integrating into local society. They are visitors, not residents – temporary guests who, the laws demand, must be prepared to return home.

Shorif Hossain, a Rohingya refugee shopkeeper, displays two of the most expensive wedding dresses in his makeshift shop. MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail

But on the fringes of many of the camp roads today, the grim black and white of the law has given way to the exuberant colour of lively bazaars, where shoppers can buy everything from Bluetooth speakers to live chickens.

Near the back of one alley lined with shops, Shorif Hossain, 42, keeps watch over a small department store’s worth of neatly displayed goods. He has for sale wedding dresses, scarves, Mercedes Mandalay Classic Slippers, men’s pinstriped formal shirts, soccer jerseys, scented coconut oil, golden bangles, antiseptic cream and German rubberized liquid-fluid ink pens.

Mr. Hossain has been selling almost since the day he and his family arrived in Bangladesh toting $400 in clothing they brought with them as they fled Myanmar, where they had also run a shop. But “at first there was no concrete, no decorations. It was bamboo and tarpaulin,” Mr. Hossain says.

In February, he opened a new shop, complete with a tin roof and cleanly swept concrete floor. The renovation set him back nearly $2,000, a considerable sum in a country where $8 is considered a decent daily wage – and even more remarkable given his location in a refugee camp where wage-earning labour is scarce.

But as a businessman, he had little choice. “If the store doesn’t look nice, customers won’t come. It needs to be beautiful,” says Mr. Hossain, who runs the shop with his son Abul Mustafa, 19.

The advent of choosy buyers is just one sign of changing circumstances in the camps, which are surrounded by military check stops designed to ensure that refugees don’t filter out and take work in surrounding communities. An increasingly sophisticated economy has emerged, fuelled partly by the resale of food rations and cash paid to labourers who work for international organizations attempting to guide some refugees toward self-sufficiency.

Those who can are cobbling together lives of their own.

Fatima Khatu waters plants in her vegetable garden in the Balukhali camp for Rohingya refugees. MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail


Women such as Fatima Khatu, 64, have been provided training – and seeds – to grow gardens. Hers sprouts calabash, spinach, carrot and red amaranth in a tiny vegetable oasis at the foot of a hill crowded with makeshift homes.

It’s enough that they can provide at least some of their own food needs. The sight of greenery in the cramped quarters of the camp provides a sense of comfort, too, a visual flourish of peace in the midst of penury. “In Myanmar, we feared the military would come and kill us. Here, we can sleep without fear,” she says.

Elsewhere, groups of women attend self-reliance training programs funded by the World Food Program, which are teaching sewing, mobile-phone repair, fabric block painting and other skills. So far, 6,000 women have received the training. Planners hope to nearly triple that number by year’s end. 

Trainees “are gaining this ambition for a better life and a better future,” says Sakheen Akhter, a worker with ActionAid, a Johannesburg-based NGO, who manages a women-friendly space where the courses take place. “They did not get those opportunities in Myanmar, so they are getting opportunities here – which can give them more freedom here.”

n Myanmar, authorities barred women such as Nor Halima, 18, from most economic activity. “The military did not allow us to move from one place to another place,” she says. In the camps, however, she has learned block painting, bracelet-making, and tailoring. She now works two to three hours a day sewing clothes for other refugees.

Another woman, Khunsoma, 20, has earned enough money selling clothes to buy her own sewing machine, a Chinese-made Butterfly brand, which she has installed in a corner of her shelter, where she lives with her family in a tidy dwelling, where clothes hang from lines and sunlight angles in through gaps in the wall. The only one in her family to make an income, she sits here to make dresses and mend shirts.

She benefits, too, from the money other refugees are earning. “A year ago, people had nothing, so they didn’t buy new clothes,” she says. “Now they are getting money from different places.”
 
Abul Boshor, left, and Muhammad Harun, centre, two Rohingya refugee men, remove weeds from a paddy field alongside a Bangladeshi worker. MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/The Globe and Mail
 
Some of those places are dozens of kilometres away from the camps themselves, like the rice paddy that covers Abul Boshor’s feet in a thick smear of greenish mud as he pulls weeds early one morning.

Mr. Boshor, 35, has six children who live in Hakimpara Camp with his wife, who recently underwent surgery. He now regularly seeks work elsewhere to buy her the medicine she needs and his children the fish whose taste they miss and crave.

Refugees are not allowed to leave the camps, and fear grips him every time he does so, sneaking on foot around the check stops. He can sometimes spend days looking for a job, surviving on a few dry biscuits, at pennies a piece. “No rice meals,” he says, “because that costs too much.”

The lack of food leaves him weakened, while the distance from family weighs on him. “It was cold yesterday, and looked like it was going to rain. I was so worried about my wife and children,” he says, shedding a tear. “Our house is made of tarp and the wind can damage it.”

Still, there is some satisfaction in earning the $8 he will be paid for a day of working dawn until dusk in the paddies. “When I go back to camp with some money, I’ll be able to buy my wife some medicine, and buy fish and vegetables and fruit for my children,” he says.

He knows, too, that life could remain like this for some time to come. “We were driven away from Myanmar by the government there,” he says. “We are grateful to Bangladesh for giving us shelter. But I’m not sure when we will go back.” 

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