“If we want to solve our problems, we should
do it ourselves”
Denied citizenship and driven out of Myanmar,
multiple generations of Rohingya families have found a reluctant home in
Bangladesh’s crowded refugee camps. But only recently have they found a voice.
Alarmed by aborted plans to repatriate
refugees to an uncertain fate in Myanmar, and by what they see as a lack of
meaningful consultation from the authorities and aid groups, Rohingya activists
are beginning to demand a greater say on issues that impact them.
This nascent advocacy was evident in the
camps this week when groups of Rohingya announced a three-day strike to protest
new identity cards issued by the Bangladesh authorities and the UN’s refugee
agency, UNHCR.
Some Rohingya fear their personal data could
be used to enable forced returns to Myanmar; the UNHCR says the system isn’t
linked to repatriation, but needed to organise and provide aid to the more than
900,000 Rohingya refugees now living in Bangladesh.
Growing grassroots activism among the
Rohingya – including an informal network of self-funded schools to teach
newcomers – is driven by a generation of refugees who came of age in the camps
as well as by more recent arrivals who graduated from school before fleeing
Myanmar.
They’re hoping to represent the larger
Rohingya refugee community on everything from education and aid policy to human
rights and justice for last year’s military purge in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine
State, which sent more than 700,000 new refugees pouring into the camps.
Mohib Ullah was one of the organisers of this
week’s protests. He heads the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human
Rights, or ARSPH, which has become one of the most prominent advocacy groups
within the camps.
“If we want to solve our problems, we should
do it ourselves. The international communities are just helpers,” he said. “The
[Rohingya] community has more trust and belief in their own organisations,
their own community, and their own family.”
Researchers and some humanitarian workers in
the camps say aid groups have largely overlooked some of these emerging voices
– part of broader criticism that the dozens of UN agencies, NGOs, and
government bodies working in Bangladesh need to be more accountable to the
refugees.
“They have done consultations with them, but
it’s always after the fact,” said Jessica Olney, who works with the Center for
Social Integrity, which has been active in bolstering Rohingya advocacy in
Bangladesh. “It’s never as a decision-making stakeholder; it’s always informing
people what was decided about them.”
With the future of Rohingya refugees
uncertain, activists say the aid sector must do a better job of listening, or
risk fuelling further frustration and disaffection among the very community it
is trying to help.
Learning to lead
Many of today’s unheralded Rohingya leaders
are refugees from previous influxes. They’ve come up through makeshift schools
run for and by refugees themselves – separate to the basic primary education
offered in NGO-run centres.
Zahid Hossain arrived in the camps in 1991,
when his parents were among an estimated 250,000 Rohingya who fled
discrimination, violence, and forced labour in Myanmar.
When he was a child, he attended one of the
refugee-run schools – often simple bamboo structures wedged alongside a
teacher’s own shelter and funded by donations raised in the camps or from the
sizeable Rohingya diaspora. Now 32 years old, Hossain is a teacher who educates
the latest generation of Rohingya refugees.
On the bamboo walls of his one-room
classroom, he has hung hand-drawn images of burning homes and tumultuous river
crossings: the students who drew the artwork arrived in the camps during last
year’s refugee surge.
Hossain believes that by educating young
Rohingya refugees he can help foster a generation of leaders that will advocate
for the community’s rights after years of persecution in Myanmar and lingering
uncertainty about their future in Bangladesh.
“They have done consultations with
them, but it’s always after the fact”.
“We can sit here getting food from different
organisations. We can sit idly by. But that would be worthless,” he said.
Hossain estimates that some 1,500 students
have passed through his class since he started teaching a decade ago and, like
Hossain, many of the children educated in the informal schools have become
teachers themselves.
During last year’s influx, the schools
offered medical help and food to the exhausted new arrivals. Today, the people
behind the informal schools also take on community duties like collecting and
disposing of waste. Graduates have gone on to work as interpreters with the
many NGOs that have followed the refugees to the camps – helping to bridge the
language gap by translating from Rohingya into both English and Bengali.
Another informal group, called the Rohingya
Community Development Campaign, comprises educated Rohingya refugees who fled
Myanmar last year or during a smaller influx in 2016. Members of the group have
printed off digital copies of textbooks used in Myanmar schools – a way to
ensure students will be ready if they’re ever able to return home.
Ullah’s organisation, ARSPH, also runs about
30 classrooms. The 43-year-old arrived with the newest wave of refugees last
year. Educated in Myanmar, he initially mobilised new refugees in the camps to
count the Rohingya killed during last year’s military purge – estimated by
Médecins Sans Frontières to number at least 6,700.
But as ARSPH’s network of volunteers grew,
Ullah turned toward education and advocacy. The group is promoting a village
council structure for solving problems in the camps – mirroring traditional
set-ups at home in Myanmar – and has volunteers on watch for signs of human
trafficking.
"In 1978, our grandfathers and
grandmothers faced problems as refugees. In '92, again; 2017, again," he
told IRIN, recounting past waves of Rohingya outflows from Myanmar. "This
is the third time. If we're not trying to solve our own problems, it will
continuously go like this. So this kind of organisation is very important to
represent the community, to solve problems its own way."
Other homegrown groups have set their eyes on
international justice.
In May, 400 women and girls in the camps
stamped their fingerprints on a petition that went before judges at the
International Criminal Court. The group, named Shanti Mohila, or “Peace Women”,
called for the court to investigate the Myanmar authorities for ”deportation,
apartheid, persecution, and genocide”. The court prosecutor has since opened a
preliminary examination into the deportation allegations.
A missing voice
Aid groups have been criticised for not
putting a greater emphasis on consulting Rohingya refugees throughout the ongoing
emergency. More than 15 months on from the start of last year’s exodus, they do
say they’re now making a more concerted effort. But this week’s protests show
there’s still a divide.
"Yes, there is vulnerability, but
at what point will you start giving them control over their own lives by
helping them to be included in the decision-making process?"
Smruti Patel, co-founder of the Global
Mentoring Initiative, which researches the role local organisations play in
humanitarian crises, said there’s a "pecking order" around aid in the
camps, and Rohingya sit at the bottom. She believes refugee skills are often
overlooked, or the community as a whole is simply labelled as vulnerable and
traumatised.
"Those kind of labels mean that people
don’t take them as if they are active in their own development and their own
well-being," Patel said. "Yes, there is vulnerability, but at what
point will you start giving them control over their own lives by helping them
to be included in the decision-making process?"
The Center for Social Integrity’s Olney said
the major aid agencies working in Bangladesh are often unaware of schooling
initiatives like Hossain’s, or hesitant about engaging with some of the more
outspoken Rohingya advocacy groups, which are often critical of aid efforts in
the camps.
“If refugee leaders could be engaged and have
buy-in from the beginning, they’d be less likely to resist or make problems
during the process,” Olney said. “I think that because they’re not being
engaged at all, in consultations around repatriation, it pushes them more into
tactics of mass resistance and non-cooperation.”
Who speaks for the Rohingya?
As Bangladesh’s refugee camps grew throughout
the 1990s, the government put in place a system of Rohingya representation
where refugees known as “mahjis” were responsible for 100 families each.
Sometimes elected but usually not, and almost invariably male, the mahjis have
been used to coordinate aid supplies and feed information to refugees.
But the system is also seen as unaccountable
and prone to corruption. Human Rights Watch has called for the mahji system to
be replaced with an elected leadership structure. However, authorities and aid
officials have not been able to fully roll out a new representation system.
These concerns about unelected leaders are
reflected in how aid groups interact with the emerging Rohingya activists, said
the Center for Social Integrity’s Jessica Olney. She believes groups like ARSPH
are often not consulted because some aid organisations view them as
“hardliners” due to their criticism of UNHCR and others. But there’s also
scepticism about how representative such grassroots activists are of the wider
refugee community in the camps, Olney said.
UNHCR did not respond to questions on this
issue.
*But the voice of the Rohingya refugees is
being heard more and more.
The activists organising this week’s strike
said they would stop working for three days and urged Rohingya teachers, health
workers, interpreters, labourers, and others across the camps to follow suit.
Earlier this month, Rohingya protested
against Bangladesh’s plans to kickstart returns to Myanmar in one part of the
camps. The controversial scheme was abandoned at the last minute.
And this past August, on the anniversary of
last year’s military operation, thousands of Rohingya lined the roads outside
in protest. Students dressed in their old Myanmar school uniforms stood at one
site; at another, women protested rape and sexual abuse allegedly committed by
Myanmar soldiers.
For Nay San Lwin, a Berlin-based Rohingya
activist, these are all positive signs of an emergent civil society within the
camps. He believes an educated leadership is key to its evolution.
"As of now, the state is leading, the
government is leading them, the aid community is leading them," he said.
"But I am sure in a few months or a year from now, they will know
themselves how they can take the lead for their own community."
Source: Kaamil Ahmed (Freelance journalist and
regular IRIN contributor)
