Kutupalong, Bangladesh: Burmese Rohingya refugees who are living in the Kutupalong makeshift refugee camp are facing enormous hardship, said a refugee expert from Cox’s Bazar named Hamid Husson. Many Rohingya refugees are seeking asylum in Bangladesh because they are subject to persecution in Burma, but Bangladesh’s government is reluctant to grant asylum to Rohingyas, a situation which has forced them to struggle for survival in makeshift camps established in Bangladesh near the Bangladesh-Burma border.
In Bangladesh, there are two types of refugees—those officially recognized as refugees by the Bangladesh government and those that aren’t officially recognized. Most unrecognized refugees are living close to the Bangladesh-Burma border with local people or in makeshift camps located at Kutupalong and Lada, Hamid said.
However, the two makeshift camps aren’t getting any support from Bangladesh’s government. Bangladesh has also restricted NGO access to the camps. As a result, refugees living in these unofficial camps have been desperately finding ways to survive. According to Hamid, they have been engaged in a variety of occupations such as fishing, agriculture, rickshaw driving, and day labor.
At Kutupalong the conditions are miserable because the refugees have had to build shacks on their own using any materials they could find, including bamboo, plastic, bushes, branches, and mud. The living conditions at Lada camp are slightly better though because the shacks at Lada were built by EU, said Monir Ahmed, a refugee from Kutupalong who is seeking asylum in Bangladesh.
The health situation is the same at both camps, as both receive assistance from public health NGO’s. The Kutupalong camp receives help from Médecins Sans Frontières and the Lada camp receives health care assistance from Muslim Aid, said Mr. Monir.
Bangladesh doesn’t provide education to children inside the camps, but at Kutupalong some Rohingya refugees are providing private education to refugee children. There are no public or private educational opportunities for children at Lada, but both camps have religious schools for children, according to an elder from the camp named Hashim.
Both camps face water shortages in the summer---especially the Lada camp. During the rainy season many shacks at the Kutupalong camp get destroyed by the heavy rain and wind. This has caused considerable hardship to the refugees, said Anis Ullah, a Kutupalong camp leader.
Refugee families are particularly hard-pressed in cases where the head of a household is arrested and jailed by Bangladeshi authorities, as the head of the household often provides most of the family’s income. These situations often cause other family members to starve and prompt young children to start begging or looking for any job they can find, said Anis Ullah.
Hamid Hussion said the biggest problem for Rohingya refugees seeking asylum in Bangladesh is simply that Bangladesh refuses to grant asylum to Rohingyas, so their situation in the country is precarious, unstable, and insecure.
Bangladesh’s government began limiting the number of Rohingya refugees eligible for asylum in 2005—despite the fact that many Burmese refugees from other ethnic groups (e.g. Rakhine, Chin, and Burman) are still granted asylum in Bangladesh relatively quickly, Hamid said.
