Tracking the Relocation of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: A Nighttime Lighting Approach

 Tearlinemil ( Human Rights )

Published :Jan 13 2022
In partnership with RAND and written by Eric Robinson, Maggie Habib, Sean Mann, and Ed Burke

Overview

This report uses nighttime lighting data to track the relocation of Rohingya refugees from the Cox's Bazaar region of Bangladesh to Bhasan Char, a 'floating island' in the Bay of Bengal built by the Government of Bangladesh to house roughly 100,000 refugees. Constructed on reclaimed land in a monsoon, cyclone, and tsunami-prone region, Bhasan Char poses not only humanitarian challenges, but physical and human rights challenges as the Rohingya become isolated from the mainland.

This report demonstrates how nighttime lighting data serves as a useful independent measure of the Government of Bangladesh's efforts to relocate Rohingya refugees onto the island over time, which could prove beneficial to those involved in humanitarian and disaster resilience and response planning over the coming months and years. 

The NUG must commit to human rights for all Myanmar’s people

Frontier Myanmar

By LAETITIA VAN DEN ASSUM and SEAN BAIN | FRONTIER
MAY 18, 2021

The mass street protests of February featured regular displays of inter-ethnic solidarity, but making space for more marginalised groups like the Rohingya will require a greater political transformation. Here, the flags of various ethnic groups are help up at an anti-coup demonstration in Yangon on February 18. (AFP)

To secure international support and an inclusive future, the National Unity Government must pledge to defend the rights of everyone in the country – including the Rohingya.

Myanmar’s struggle for democracy is underpinned by a common aspiration for a different future – one free of military rule and the crimes, plunder and discrimination that comes with it. But it is not year clear whether this future includes all of Myanmar’s people.

U.S. Statement on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar

 

Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews

Statement by the Delegation of the United States of America
As Delivered by Mark Cassayre
Chargé d’affaires, U.S. Mission Geneva


Human Rights Council – 46th Session

March 11, 2021

Thank you, Mr. Andrews, for your continued focus on human rights in Myanmar following the February 1 coup. The United States strongly supports the independence of mandate holders.

We stand with the people of Myanmar as they pursue democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms, and respect for the rule of law.

We call on all members of the international community to join efforts to press the military to refrain from violence against peaceful protestors and restore power to the democratically elected government.

Move of Rohingya Refugees Poses Environmental and Human Rights Concerns

EcoWatch

Tina Gerhardt
Dec. 18, 2020

Rohingya refugees board a Bangladesh Navy ship to be transported to the island of Bhashan Char in Chittagong on December 4, 2020. AFP / Getty Images

On December 4, about 1,600 Rohingya traveled across the Bay of Bengal in seven navy boats from Chattogram to Bhasan Char. Bangladesh plans to move 100,000 families to the island.

The move poses serious concerns, both with regard to the environment and human rights.

Located about 18.6 miles (30 km) from the mainland, Bhasan Char is low-lying and prone to flooding. Therefore, it has been uninhabited. The island only formed in the past 20 years as a result of silt buildup. Bhasan Char rests at the confluence of three large rivers, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Meghna River, which collectively bring rich deposits of silt to the bay.

Human rights group to govt: Facilitate a visit to Bhasan Char

Dhaka Tribune 

Tribune Desk
November 12th, 2020

File photo: Forcibly displaced Rohingya refugees playing football at a refugee camp in Bhashan Char ISPR

 

The government is moving forward with plans to relocate up to 100,000 Rohingya from Cox’s Bazar district to Bhasan Char

Five human rights organization have requested the government of Bangladesh to facilitate and provide access to Bhasan Char, including unfettered access to meet with Rohingyas.

The five organizations are Amnesty International, Refugees International, Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, Fortify Rights, and ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR).

Human Rights Watch Report

II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 

Northern Arakan, consisting of contemporary Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, has since the late eighteenth century been a region of intermittent unrest and refugee flows. Thousands of Rohingya fled to what is now Bangladesh in four main periods: the late 1700s and early 1800s, the 1940s, 1978 and, most recently, in 1991and 1992. Refugee flows have been prompted by ethnic and religious conflict which were in turn triggered by broader political struggles. This section provides a description of each of the first three flights and concludes with specific attention to the 1991-92 exodus, asylum and return. A historic overview of the region not only serves to reveal the long history of refugee flows in the area, but also traces the attachment of the Rohingya to northern Arakan and thus their firmly established link to what is modern Burma.

UK imposes sanctions against human rights abusers

B B C

6 July 2020
Killing of Jamal Khashoggi

Image copyright Reuters

The UK is imposing sanctions on 49 people and organisations behind the most "notorious" human rights abuses of recent years.

Individuals implicated in the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009 will have their UK assets frozen and banned from entering the country.

And Saudi Arabian officials involved in the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi are also being targeted.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the move sent a "clear message".

At The Door Of The New Decade, We Must Strive A Better Legacy For Human Rights

Forbes

Ewelina U. Ochab Contributor
Policy,Jan 2, 2020,

We closed the last decade with a very poor human rights record. It was a decade which saw two genocides, several instances of crimes against humanity and multiple cases of severe violations of human rights.

What should we do to ensure that this does not continue into the new decade? Among others, we must ensure that international crimes and human rights violations do not happen again. Prevention is key. However, we must also ensure an effective response to the crimes that were left unaddressed from the previous decade. What does this involve?

UN General Assembly votes to condemn human rights abuses of Myanmar's Rohingya

ABC News
2019-12-28

Photo: A woman reacts as Rohingya refugees wait to receive aid in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh in September 2017. (Reuters: Cathal McNaughton, file)

The United Nations General Assembly has approved a resolution strongly condemning human rights abuses against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims and other minorities, including arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and deaths in detention. 

The 193-member world body voted 134-9 with 28 abstentions in favour of the resolution which also calls on Myanmar's Government to take urgent measures to combat incitement of hatred against the Rohingya and other minorities in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan states.

Myanmar Rohingya: UN condemns human rights abuses

B B C
NEWS
2019-12-208

Tens of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar for refugee camps in Bangladesh

The UN General Assembly has approved a resolution condemning human rights abuses against Muslim Rohingya and other minorities in Myanmar.

The resolution also calls on Myanmar to stop the incitement of hatred against the Rohingya and other minorities.

USC doctor finds evidence of human rights abuses, alleged war crimes against Rohingya refugees

USC News
BY Eric Lindberg
October 17, 2019

Through interviews with Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar, USC emergency physician Parveen Parmar and others document brutal attacks against the Muslim minority group.

The attacks usually start at night, foreshadowed by barking dogs and the chatter of machine guns in the distance.

AJ Shorts wins human rights press award in Hong Kong

Aljazeera 
22/05/2019

Digital documentary Growing up too Fast in Afghanistan was recognised in the short video category.

 The film is about a 14-year-old boy whose father was killed by ISIL, forcing him to abandon school [Al Jazeera]

The Al Jazeera English Online unit AJ Shorts was honoured alongside fellow awards winners from The New York Times, Reuters, BBC, Washington Post and leading East Asian news outlets at this year's Human Rights Press Awards ceremony in Hong Kong.

‘Genocide’, ‘human rights’ and what’s lost in translation

Frontier
MYANMAR 

By THAN TOE AUNG | FRONTIER

Wednesday, May 08, 2019

A screenshot of a cartoon published on The Irrawaddy's website that caused an outcry among human rights activists. (Than Toe Aung)  

The fight to protect human rights and counter genocide is hampered by the way these terms are understood in Myanmar, and mistranslation is partly to blame.
On March 28, the Burmese edition of The Irrawaddy published a cartoon on its website that caused an outcry among human rights activists in Myanmar.

Human rights, Rohingya crisis skirted at Asia summit

LAKELAND OBSERVER

By Lakeland Staff Writer on March 31, 2019



Malaysia‘s Prime Minister Najib Razak, Myanmar‘s State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, Thailand‘s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, Vietnam‘s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, South Korea President Moon Jae-in, Philippines‘ President Rodrigo Duterte, Singapore‘s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Brunei‘s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Cambodia‘s Prime Minister Hun Sen, Indonesia‘s President Joko Widodo and Laos‘ Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith join hands during a family photo before the 19th Asean Republic of Korea Summit in Manila, Philippines on Monday. (Reuters photo)

MANILA: Leaders of Asian nations meeting in Manila on Monday skirted around the mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims triggered by Myanmar‘s military crackdown, disappointing human rights groups who were hoping for a tough stand on the humanitarian crisis.

Rohingya human rights violation continues, says UN rights chief

DhakaTribune
Humayun Kabir Bhuiyan
Published at 11:28 pm March 20th, 2019

Michelle Bachelet Reuters

'Our report observes that no steps have been taken to adequately address the issue of citizenship of the Rohingya people'

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said the Myanmar authorities continue violating the fundamental and human rights of the Rohingya community and no measures have been taken to address the citizenship issue.

Refugees as criminals? US govt report blames Amit Shah for calling Bangladeshis termites

Counterview 
Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Counterview Desk 

 

The chapter “Freedom of Movement” of the US State Department’s “India 2018 Human Rights Report”, released recently, has criticized BJP chief Amit Shah for terming alleged Bangladeshis who may be in Assam as “termites”, because their names were struck down from the list of National Register of Citizens, under preparation in the state. 

မြန်မာ့ လူ့အခွင့်အရေး စိုးရိမ်မကင်းဖြစ်မှု ကန်အစီရင် ခံစာ ထောက်ပြ

VOA

ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
အင်ကြင်းနိုင်၊1
4 မတ်၊ 2019

 Ambassador Michael Kozak from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

၂၀၁၇ ခုနှစ်က ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်မှာ ရိုဟင်ဂျာတွေ အပေါ် မြန်မာစစ်တပ်က လူမျိုးစုအလိုက် ရှင်းလင်းဖယ် ရှား တဲ့ ပြစ်မှု ကျူးလွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ သက်သေ အထောက်အထားတွေကို အမေရိကန် နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဌာနရဲ့စုံစမ်းစစ်ဆေး ရေးအဖွဲ့က အခိုင်အမာ တွေ့ရှိထားကြောင်း နောက်ဆုံး ထုတ်ပြန်လိုက်တဲ့ အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဌာနရဲ့ လူ့အခွင့် အရေး အစီရင်ခံစာမှာ ဖေါ်ပြထားပါတယ်။

UN rights expert calls for end to ‘purgatory’ of ‘international inaction’ facing Myanmar’s remaining Rohingya

UN News

UNHCR/Roger Arnold

11 March 2019

Rohingya families arrive at a UNHCR transit centre near the village of Anjuman Para, Cox’s Bazar, south-east Bangladesh after spending four days stranded at the Myanmar border with some 6,800 refugees. (file)

A humanitarian crisis fuelled by the suppression of basic human rights is continuing across Myanmar’s Rakhine state, a UN Human Rights Council-appointed expert said on Monday, in an appeal for alleged atrocities there to be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

UN urges social media, investors to promote human rights in Myanmar

A 

Channel News Asia

06 Mar 2019

Several countries have called for Myanmar's military leaders to be held accountable for its alleged genocide of the country's Rohingya minority AFP/Dibyangshu SARKAR

GENEVA: Social media firms and foreign investors must do more to ensure they support human rights in Myanmar, U.N. Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee said on Tuesday (Mar 5), suggesting Facebook was failing to treat parties to the country's conflict even-handedly.

214- Huma Rights Reports (2002) MaungDaw-Buthidaung

MaungDaw-Buthidaung