Muhammad Rezwan was 21 when he walked hundreds of miles to flee attacks on his home by the Myanmar army in 2017, a military campaign that UN experts have characterised as a genocide.
Eight years later, he is kept awake at night not by immediate threats to his safety, but by the thought of raising his two daughters – aged two and four – in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh. “It is almost a decade since I fled with hundreds of people in my village for a better future. But the situation is still grim. The future of my young daughters is at stake,” Rezwan tells The Independent.
Bangladesh is sheltering around 1.2 million Rohingya Muslim refugees – half of them children – who have fled waves of violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Of these, some 700,000 came in a huge exodus beginning on 25 August 2017, travelling by foot and by boat amid indiscriminate shelling, massacres, and the torching of entire villages in Rakhine state, where Myanmar’s army was fighting the Arakan Army insurgent group.
The military crackdown in Rakhine came at a time when Aung San Suu Kyi was in power as state counsellor. She infamously defended the military against allegations of genocide in 2019 at the International Court of Justice, before she was deposed by those same generals in a 2021 coup d’etat. The Independent’s documentary Cancelled: The Rise and Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi explores that episode as well as Suu Kyi’s continued imprisonment.
While the Bangladesh government and the UN have long campaigned for the safe return of the Rohingya refugees, the situation inside Myanmar has remained volatile, especially in Rakhine – with locals facing a battle for survival only complicated by recent aid cuts imposed by US president Donald Trump.
Trump’s aid cuts are already having a dramatic impact on the camps in Bangladesh, with food rations being hit, says Alexander Matheou, the Asia Pacific regional director of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “If people don’t have enough to eat, the camps will not be a safe place to be – with very unpredictable consequences,” he tells The Independent.
Besides food, the soap rations will stop flowing, which will have a massive impact on hygiene and public health. Educational services will also close in 2025, affecting around 250,000 children, says Matheou.
“It’s an international crisis,” he says, adding that the solution should come from neighbouring countries in south and southeast Asia.
The IFRC provides relief and fireproof shelters, among other services, to the refugees in the camps, to prevent their lives from crumbling every few months because of repeated natural disasters in the storm-prone region.
Recently, the Rohingya refugees staged a protest at Kutupalong, one of the largest of more than 30 camps in Cox’s Bazar, to express their frustration over the ongoing civil war in Myanmar and uncertainty over their return. “We are here today because the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army committed genocide against our community. We are here today to remember the people who lost their lives and who sacrificed their lives for being Muslim,” Nur Aziz, 19, told the Associated Press.
“We want to go back to our country with equal rights like other ethnic groups in Myanmar. The rights they are enjoying in Myanmar as citizens of the country, we too want to enjoy the same rights,” he said.
Despite a sharp rise in arrivals over the past 18 months, funding for the camps has been cut substantially. The UN refugee agency UNHCR says it needs about $256m (£189m) to support the displaced Rohingya Muslims this year. The amount is the lowest in six years, but the agency has only been pledged enough funding to cover around 38 per cent of the total.
Rokeya Bibi, mother to a seven-year-old boy, shares a single semi-permanent structure with her family of four. She is among the thousands of mothers who worry about their children’s lack of access to education in the camps. “My son sits idle all day. Without proper education, without proper means of livelihood, he could end up doing something illegal in the future,” she tells The Independent.
“No one even bats an eye about our situation. Are our lives not as important as those in other part of the world?” she rues.
Rohingya Muslims form the largest concentration of stateless people who lack economic power or the means to guarantee their own security and wellbeing. “It is very much an international responsibility to find a solution” to the crisis, says Matheou. The responsibility is not Bangladesh’s alone, he says, adding that the country has already done the most important thing by providing protection.
Bangladesh has no scope to allocate more resources to Rohingya refugees, announced Muhammad Yunus, the de facto leader of the south Asian country, urging the international community to find a sustainable solution to the crisis.
“We don’t foresee any scope whatsoever for further mobilisation of resources from domestic sources, given our numerous challenges,” Yunus said.
He called on the international community to draft a practical roadmap for the Rohingya to return to Myanmar. “The Rohingya issue and its sustainable resolution must be kept alive on the global agenda, as they need our support until they return home.”
Since 2017, Bangladesh has attempted at least twice to send back the refugees, and has urged the international community to build pressure on Myanmar’s government to establish a peaceful environment that could assist their repatriation. Successive governments in Bangladesh have also sought repatriation support from China.
“It’s a collective responsibility to try to manage this well. And that’s partly a responsibility of financing wellbeing in the short term. It’s partly a responsibility around providing third-party repatriation for some of the most vulnerable people,” Matheou says.
“The original idea was to find a way of managing safe and voluntary repatriation, and at the same time to try to mobilise commitment to manage support in the meantime, because you can’t repatriate so many people so quickly,” he says.
“Given the deterioration of the security situation in the Rakhine, it’s unlikely to achieve its original objectives. So I’m sure the government of Bangladesh will want the objective to be backed up as an aspiration and not dropped, but ultimately that’s what everyone should work for, especially those governments that have influence over the Arakan Army and over Myanmar generally.”
This article is part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
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