Unravelling the Rohingya crisis

The Star
Saturday, 30 Mar 2024

Gruelling journey: A file pic of ethnic Rohingya disembarking from their boat upon landing on a beach in Ulee Madon, North Aceh, Indonesia, on Nov 16, 2023. — AP 

A dramatic story of survival and rescue off the western coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province has put the spotlight again on the plight of ethnic Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar who make extremely dangerous voyages across the Indian Ocean to seek better lives.

Gangs, kidnappings, murders drive Rohingya from camps

ASIA TIMES
by Ruth Wells and Max William Loomes
March 29, 2024

Since October 1, 2023, around 3,100 people have tried to escape by boat – an increase by almost three quarters 

Late last week, a boat crammed with Rohingya refugees fleeing a squalid camp in Bangladesh capsized off the coast of Indonesia. Around 75 people were rescued, including nine children, but more than 70 are missing and presumed dead.

NEPAL: Students visit Rohingya refugees

MISSIOMnewswire
February 27, 2024 

Refugees also receive support from Nepal Don Bosco Society

(MissionNewswire) A group of 5th-grade students from Nepal Don Bosco School, located in Siddhipur, Nepal, visited the settlement for Rohingya refugees in the District of Lalitpur, a neighboring district of Kathmandu. Students were accompanied by their class teacher and the principal Father Binu Jacob.

Myanmar Junta forcefully recruiting Rohingya from camps

THE BUSINESS STANDARD
TBS Report
24 February, 2024,

Legal experts say that the drive is illegal since Myanmar has refused to recognize the Rohingya as one of the country’s ethnic groups and denied them citizenship for decades 

Rohingyas are entering Bangladesh territory crossing Myanmar border on October 9, 2017. Photo: Salahuddin Ahmed Paulash/TBS
 

In the wake of a nationwide conscription law, Myanmars junta is seeking to recruit Rohingya muslims to join their army. They are offering freedom of movement to those restricted to camps from displacement in the Rakhine state as a way to entice them into military service.

WFP food rations for each Rohingya increased to $10

Dhaka Tribune
Tribune Desk
Publish : 14 Dec 2023, 

The image shows a WFP food outlet in the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, one of the 19 outlets where families come and purchase food every month using WFP e-vouchers. Photo: WFP/Saikat Mojumder

 

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) will increase food rations for each Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazar from $8 to $10 starting in January.

Ukhiya မွာ ၿပိဳင္ဘက္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အုပ္စုေတြၾကား ေသနတ္ ပစ္ခတ္မႈမွာ ၇ ဦး ေသဆုံး

UKIYA.COM
Published:22-10-2021,

Zawgyi

ေကာ့ဘဇားရွိ စခန္းတစ္ခုတြင္ ၿပိဳင္ဘက္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္အဖြဲ႕ႏွစ္ဖြဲ႕ၾကား ခိုက္ရန္ျဖစ္ပြားမႈေၾကာင့္အနည္း ဆုံး လူခုနစ္ဦး ေသဆုံးခဲ့သည္။

 

ေသာၾကာေန႔ နံနက္ ၄ နာရီ ၁၅ မိနစ္ခန႔္က Ukhiya ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့ေသာ ေသနတ္ပစ္ခတ္မႈ တြင္ အျခားလူအမ်ားအျပား ဒဏ္ရာရခဲ့ေၾကာင္း လက္နက္ကိုင္ ရဲတပ္ရင္း ၈ မွ ရဲမႉး Shihab Kaiser Khan မွ ရဲမႉး Shihab Kaiser Khan က ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

ထို႔ေနာက္ ဒဏ္ရာရသူမ်ားကို စခန္းအနီးရွိ ေဆးခန္းသို႔ ပို႔ေဆာင္ခဲ့သည္။ ေသဆုံးသူမ်ားကို အာဏာပိုင္မ်ား က ေဖာ္ထုတ္နိုင္ျခင္း မရွိေသးေပ။

Floods bring new misery for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh camps

UNHCR

Hannah Macdonald and Ehsanul Hoque
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
30 July 2021

Refugee volunteers are working day and night in heavy rain to rescue refugees stranded due to severe flooding in the camps. © UNHCR/BDRCS

Heavy monsoon rains had been falling incessantly for days when Meher Khatun, 60, noticed water starting to come into the bamboo and tarpaulin shelter she shares with her son, daughter-in-law and grandchild in a refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar District.

Rohingya Refugee Camps Are Being Set On Fire

VICE

By Jaishree Kumar

ROHINGYA REFUGEES SEARCH FOR VALUABLES AMID THE DEBRIS DAYS AFTER A FIRE BURNT THEIR HOME AT A REFUGEE CAMP IN COX'S BAZAR ON MARCH 25, 2021.

PHOTO: MUNIR UZ ZAMAN / AFP

Several small fires have engulfed dozens of make-shift homes in Rohingya refugee camps in India and Bangladesh in the last two weeks and it is unclear who is causing them.

These incidents follow a large fire that broke out on March 22 in Bangladesh at Cox’s Bazar. The fire ravaged through 10,000 make-shift homes, killing at least 15 people and displacing 45,000. Investigations into the cause of that fire are still underway. The UN allocated $14 million dollars to help rehabilitate the refugees left homeless by the fire in the world’s largest refugee camp.

UN experts urge probe of Rohingya killings in Bangladesh

Dhaka (AFP)
18 September 2019

UN human rights experts have raised new concerns about the treatment of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh following a deadly backlash over the killing of a ruling party official.

At an August 25 rally, some 200,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh marked two years since the exodus from Myanmar after a military crackdown | © AFP/File | MUNIR UZ ZAMAN  

The experts called for an “impartial” investigation into the deaths of at least six Rohingya men in gunfights with police after they were named as suspects in the killing of Omar Faruk, a youth wing official of the ruling Awami League.

UN: Conditions in Rohingya camps improved, emergency prevails

Dhaka Tribune
Tribune Desk
July 15th, 2019

A market inside Rohingya refugee camp at Ukhiya in Cox's Bazar Dhaka Tribune

Rohingya camps and aid organisations are well-equipped to respond says UN
Efforts throughout 2018 and early 2019 have dramatically improved conditions in the Rohingya camps, and aid organisations are well-equipped to respond, UN agencies said.

However, there is still an emergency affecting vulnerable families living in a difficult, hazard-prone terrain, that requires ongoing support from the international community, and constant work by humanitarian actors, the UN agencies said on Monday, reports UNB.

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

 

Medical Teams in Rohingya Camps Adapt to Prolonged Crisis

VOA
South & Central Asia
Dave Grunebaum
May 10, 2019

Foysal Ahmed, a medical assistant, examines Rahim Ullah, who has diabetes.

COX’S BAZAR, BANGLADESH —

Rahim Ullah takes deep breaths as a medical assistant listens with a stethoscope to his heartbeat.

Rahim Ullah is a 62-year-old diabetic getting treatment in a refugee camp at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders. His blood pressure, reflexes and sense of feeling in his feet are also checked.

Rape, abuse, violence: Rohingya women and girls most vulnerable in refugee camps

Star2.com

April 26, 2019

By S. INDRAMALAR

Photos By The Star/Azhar Mahfof

Young mother Senoura is trying the best she can to make sure her baby is not malnourished. But with hardly any money, depending only on food rations, she is worried for her young one.

Every morning, 20-year-old Gulbahar rushes to finish her housework and cook for her family so she can spend more time at the Safe Space for Women and Girls, a women-only space supported by Unicef at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

The safe space, she says, is more than just a respite from the harsh conditions in the camp (and the tiny shelter she lives in). In that female-only space, Gulbahar is being empowered and equipped with vocational skills that she never thought she’d have the chance to acquire.

Rohingya camps in Bangladesh spawn a new civil society — and political violence

thejapantimes
by Simon Lewis, Poppy Mcpherson and Ruma Paul
Reuters
Apr 24, 2019 

Mohib Ullah, a leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, speaks to other Rohingya people who face difficulty collecting relief supplies in Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on April 7. | REUTERS

KUTUPALONG REFUGEE CAMP, BANGLADESH - It was after Mohib Ullah scored his first political victories that the death threats began in earnest. On a recent morning, the Rohingya refugee leaned back on a plastic chair in the Bangladesh camp where he lives and translated the latest warning, sent over the WhatsApp messaging app.

Myanmar, Bangladesh to discuss repatriation May 3.

MYANMAR TIMES

NYAN LYNN AUNG | 24 APR 2019

Refugees from northern Rakhine State are seen at Kutubpalang camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, last August. Photo - EPA

Myanmar and Bangladesh officials will meet on May 3 in Nay Pyi Taw to discuss the much delayed repatriation of the more than 700,000 northern Rakhine State refugees living in cramped camps in Bangladesh. 

The fourth joint working group meeting of the countries will be the first between the two sides since the failed attempt to repatriate the first batch of refugees last December.

Rohingyas, locals get skill training in crafts.

The Daily Star
April 17, 2019

Staff Correspondent

UNHCR, Ayesha Abed Foundation scale up project in Cox's bazar

The United Nations' refugee agency has teamed up with Ayesha Abed Foundation -- the humanitarian wing of Brac -- to provide income opportunities by developing skills of Rohingya and Bangladeshi women in craft production in Cox's Bazar.

The project that formally began in February is now being scaled up. At the recently-opened training facility in Ukhiya, local Bangladeshi women are taught silk screen printing, block printing and tailoring, according to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) statement.

Aid workers fear cholera outbreak in Rakhine relief camps

MYANMAR NOW
By Khin Moh Moh Lwin
28/03/2019

Over 1,000 locals from 7 villages sought shelter in War Taung refugee camp located in Kyauk Taw Township in mid-January 2019 (Photo by Aung Nyein Chan/ Myanmar Now)

Thousands displaced by fighting between the Arakan Army and the Tatmadaw in Rakhine state face a possible cholera outbreak because of unsanitary conditions in relief camps, aid workers have warned.

ARSA sets up camps at Myanmar-Bangladesh border, imparts arms training to cadres

ZEE NEWS
Myanmar-Bangladesh border
Written By: Manish Shukla
Updated: Mar 25, 2019,

As per the intelligence report, some camps are situated very close to Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.  

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) has set up bases at the Myanmar-Bangladesh border and is imparting armed training to their cadre to launch massive attacks on Myanmar security forces.

Tent camps face Cyclone Mahasen

CNN

May 20, 2013

CNN's Dan Rivers reports on the ethnic Rohingya people bracing for Tropical Cyclone Mahasen.

Source: CNN
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Link :https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2013/05/20/rivers-tent-camps-mahasen.cnn

Rohingya 'lost generation' struggle to study in Bangladesh camps

REUTERS

By Poppy McPherson and Ruma Paul
Monday, 18 March 2019

For years, Bangladeshi schools have quietly admitted some of the Rohingya but the new influx has tested the hospitality of the Bangladeshi government.

COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh, March 18 (Reuters) - Sixteen-year-old Kefayat Ullah walked to his school in southern Bangladesh in late January, as he had done most days for the previous six years, to find that - despite being one of the top students in his class - he had been expelled.