Without a homeland, without a hope By Tony Cliff

COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh - Mahamuda Khatur remembers the fateful day three years ago. At dawn her husband had left their Kutupalong refugee camp in southern Bangladesh for the forest to fetch firewood he would sell to other refugees or local people. He never returned.

Mahamuda was told that he had drowned in a river, a claim she has never independently verified. That left her as a 27-year-old widow with two children. Now, suffering from tuberculosis for eight months, Mahamuda is too weak to work and cannot feed herself or her children.

The pallor of her face and the thinness of her arms show the unmistakable signs of severe malnutrition. Now, she has to rely on other refugees' generosity to survive. "But there is not much that the people here can do for us," she says. "Everybody is in the same situation." 

Mahamuda is an ethnic Rohingya, a Sunni Muslim community that has fled persecution in its native Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh and other countries. Throughout this region, on a narrow strip of beach, sparse forest or sandy land squeezed between the Bay of Bengal and the Myanmar border, Rohingya exiles can be seen carrying heavy bags of salt, bundles of firewood, stacks of bricks, baskets of fish, blocks of ice.

Above all, they carry the weight of being one of the largest stateless populations on the planet. Out of an estimated 1.5 to 2 million population, only the 48,800 Rohingya registered as refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Bangladesh and Malaysia have legal status. The one million or so Rohingya living in Myanmar's western Arakan State are not recognized as citizens and the 500,000 to one million others who have chosen exile in other countries are mostly considered illegal migrants.

The Rohingya were not always a pariah in Myanmar, previously known as Burma. Although they have been a constant victim of a chauvinist Buddhist regime animated by anti-Muslim and anti-Indian sentiment dating back to the British colonial occupation, the Rohingya had citizen status in Myanmar until 1982. That year, then dictator Ne Win promulgated a citizenship law that stripped them of their nationality. It was the epilogue of one of the darkest chapters in the country's recent history, the Naga Min Operation ("Operation Dragon King") launched in 1978 in the west Arakan State.

In the name of a crackdown on "illegal migrants", the army killed, raped and arrested scores of people, mostly Rohingya. Villages were burned and looted. Mosques and other religious sites were particularly targeted. That operation forced some 200,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Most of them were repatriated by the end of 1979. In 1991-1992, fleeing the junta's widespread use of forced labor, summary executions, torture and rape, another wave of 250,000 Rohingya left the country. Currently the regime continues repressive practices, although on a lesser scale.

 During a discrete visit in a large Rohingya village in Arakan State last year, in the relative safety of an old mosque, an elder detailed the numerous restrictions imposed by Myanmar authorities on the local population. "Even though we have been living here for many generations, we need a special authorization for almost everything: to move out of our area, send our children to the university, marry them, run a business. And, as everyone else in the state, we are constantly submitted to forced labor, arbitrary arrest, land confiscation and other abuses by the authorities."

Rohingya also complain of being targeted by the Rakhine, the predominant Buddhist group in Myanmar's Arakan State. It's a bitter irony considering that the Rakhine themselves are subject to the junta's systematic oppression against ethnic minorities. Violent incidents such as attacks on mosques by Buddhist radicals and retaliation by Rohingya are regularly reported. To justify their stance, both communities have traded endless arguments often founded on biased or reconstructed historical facts.

Xenophobia, fueled by extremists from both sides but also by the ruling junta, which has masterfully used divide and rule tactics to maintain its control, has submerged any hope of a dispassionate debate. Still, arguments forwarded by the Rakhine community, such as the "fear that the Rohingya occupy our land because of their high birth rate and rapidly increasing population", as a Rakhine journalist exiled in Bangladesh put it, have some basis and will eventually need to be properly addressed.

The dramatic situation of Rohingya exiles in Bangladesh, a country more accessible than Myanmar to outside observers, has become the show case for the minority's stateless plight. Some 29,000 Rohingya live as refugees in Kutupalong and Nayapara camps, south of Cox's Bazar, a booming beach resort in Bangladesh. These camps are under the UNHCR's supervision and benefit from the presence of a few international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). With properly built houses, schools, playgrounds and a sewage system, they look like any other adequately administered refugee camps in the world.

"We don't have enough mosquito nets," laments Karim, the community leader of one of the six blocks dividing the camp. "Many diseases are endemic here, malaria, diarrhea and tuberculosis. And now we have to face an epidemic of chicken pox and measles."

A few kilometers to the south, Leda, the other non-official camp with a population of 13,700, offers a relatively less desperate face. Rattan-built houses are properly aligned along paved alleys, here and there emblazoned with flowers and greenery. Yet restrictions imposed by Bangladesh authorities in the makeshift camps are drastic. Food distribution and education are sharply curtailed. Still, if these rules were strictly enforced then "Kutupalong makeshift" and Leda would have turned into full-blown death camps.

Despite the appalling conditions, refugees manage to bypass these interdictions and organize their survival. In Kutupalong, for instance, as a substitute to a proper schooling establishment, community leaders with the help of outside sympathizers have set up a network of 30 classes inside huts with locally trained teachers.

The restriction on wandering outside the makeshift camps is perhaps the least observed of the restraints. "Many refugees leave them for a few days or a week to work in brick or dried fish factories, salt pans, as rickshaw drivers," says Karim, the Kutupalong community leader. "They usually work for 100 taka a day [about US$1.4], which is not enough to feed a family so often both parents have to work."