Episode #161: The Rohingya Refugee Crisis (Bonus Shorts)
Dan Sullivan, the Director of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East at Refugees International, joins this episode to discuss the challenges that the Rohingya community has been facing in Myanmar. Most of the world began to pay attention to the Rohingya crisis when it flared up in 2017, causing over 700,000 people to flee in what the United States later declared to be a genocide, and the camps in Bangladesh remain the largest refugee settlement in the world.
“They come from a part of the country where there are other groups, including the Rakhine, who have also been marginalized,” he says. “There's been a mixed history there, where the Rakhine and the Rohingya have worked together, but also have community tensions, and you've had different groups that have exploited that.”
Sullivan points out that although the Rakhine people consistently faced oppression from Bamar leaders, going back to the era of kings, the Rohingya face even more challenges because of their Muslim faith, which puts them at odds with both the Bamar majority and even the native Rakhine. In fact, while the Rohingya have been on their land for at least a century, their citizenship continues to be challenged. “It goes beyond just denying that Rohingya are citizens, to claims that the Rohingya just don't exist as a people,” he notes sadly, “that they're illegal Bengalis, that there is no Rohingya… that is the argument.”
Sullivan paints a picture of the Rohingya cast as scapegoats through the hateful rhetoric of Bamar Buddhist nationalists, and victims of violence and assault at the hands of the Burmese military. He notes that although the military was technically not wielding power after the 2015 NLD electoral victory, they still had much influence behind the scenes. When the by-now, infamous killings and subsequent mass exodos were taking place, Sullivan was active on the ground, and led an effort pressuring the United States to recognize what was occurring for what it was. Fittingly, his campaign was termed, “Call It A Genocide!”
While the burgeoning Rohingya refugee settlements are incontrovertibly a human disaster, it had the makings of an ecological one as well. The expanding camps in Bangladesh were only made possible by a mass deforestation of the surrounding area, as a large number of trees have been cut down for fuel and to make room for the influx of new refugees. However, Sullivan points out that fortunately, things have been improving in this regard. The area is greening up, people are planting rooftop gardens, and drainage is getting better, allowing for easier access to the camps.
But under the surface, there is a pervasive feeling of desperation. “There really is this growing sense of despair and hopelessness,” he says, describing the countless conversations he’s had with Rohingya people. “In talking to a health worker who focuses on mental trauma, at the very beginning, what they were seeing was the immediate trauma of what people had seen in fleeing and being attacked, shifting now to this, more long-term trauma of a sense of no future.” For example, the Rohingya have an extremely limited access to education and a choice of livelihood, and security at the refugee camps has been deteriorating.
This has led many Rohingya to flee and seek a better life elsewhere, often by boat. Sullivan notes that thousands have taken to the seas, and describes the hardships of those who are turned away by the neighboring countries they manage to get to, and many others who are tragically stranded at sea and ultimately drown. What is worse, some countries, like Australia, employ “tow-back”; that is, they tow the boats further out to sea to prevent docking on their land. Other countries, such as Thailand, return the Rohingya who come ashore there back to the arms of the same military that was formally accused of launching a genocide against them!
Sullivan says that many Rohingya currently look at the work of the National Unity Government (NUG) with hope. This is in contrast to the betrayal that many felt when the NLD, and Aung San Suu Kyi in particular, defended the military’s actions against the Rohingya at The Hague.
“One of the major shifts that happened after the coup is that we saw various groups within Myanmar starting to express some empathy for the Rohingya for the first time, seeing the military for what it was,” he explains. “Right now, the military is attacking any citizen who stands up and says that they're in favor of democracy. And let alone the other minority ethnic groups that that have been persecuted by the military! And so we've seen with the National Unity Government that they've put out a pretty progressive policy on the Rohingya, and that is encouraging.”
Even so, should the NUG ultimately prevail, there remains much concern as to how they would translate sympathetic and inclusive statements about the Rohingya into a viable and realistic repatriation plan. “But that's later on,” he acknowledges. “For now. It starts with just continuing to rally international pressure and coordinating things like targeted sanctions and pushing for arms embargoes and things like that to pressure the military and then finding ways to support the opposition.”