Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
T
he children were playing in the dirt, their small, frail, and skinny bodies apparently no obstacle to their having some fun. But health worker Nurul Hassan looked on worriedly as he told Asia Democracy Chronicles (ADC) that the children – who are among the more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees in camps in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh – have been eating only lentils and rice since last March. Hassan, who is using a pseudonym for this story, explained that the children’s parents have no money to buy milk, meat, or vegetables for them, which is why they had become so thin.
Cox’s Bazar hosts the biggest refugee camp in the world: Kutupalong. It used to have less than 100,000 Rohingya who were fleeing abuse and discrimination in their native Myanmar during the late 1990s. But ethnic violence erupted in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017, with the Rohingya as the prime target. That led to more than 700,000 Rohingya seeking refuge in next-door Bangladesh, and they have stayed there since.

To help Bangladesh cope with the sudden influx of refugees, the World Food Programme (WFP) has been providing food assistance in the overcrowded Rohingya refugee camps. For the now nearly 1.2 million Rohingya who are unable to legally work in Bangladesh, WFP’s vouchers have been a lifeline, enabling them to choose from over 40 dry and fresh food items at food outlets in every camp. But funding for the refugees has been suffering shortfalls in the last several years. Last March, a US$125-million shortfall forced WFP to reduce the value of the vouchers from US$12 to US$10 per person per month. Three months later, with further donor shortfalls, WFP cut the value of the vouchers further, to US$8 per month.
“Just eight dollars worth of food is not enough for us,” said Hassan, who is a Rohingya refugee himself. He pointed out that even before the cuts, many camp residents, especially young children, the elderly, and pregnant women, were already in bad shape because of food scarcity, leading to stunting and vitamin deficiencies. “Now,” he rues, “we are all facing a malnutrition problem.”
For WFP, the problem has been an unending funding crisis. Its current monthly operating costs are US$73.6 million above their 2019 average – a 44-percent rise. Rising food inflation (prices increased by 9.09 percent, up from 8.13 percent in February 2023), possible donor fatigue, and competing humanitarian demands (the war in Ukraine, the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and drought in East Africa) have forced it to cut rations, not just in Bangladesh, but also in Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Ecuador, Mali, Palestine, Tanzania, and Uganda. This, WFP states, is “tantamount to taking from the hungry to feed the starving.”
Absolutely no welcome mats
At this juncture, the presence of growing populations of refugees – 108.4 million at last count – who are completely dependent on humanitarian aid poses a challenge. Not surprisingly, there has been an increase in appeals to host governments to relax their often stringent regulations on refugees and help them be more self-reliant. But with many of host countries having their own economic and political struggles, the focus has been more on ensuring that there will be little or no measure that would encourage even more refugees heading their way.
This has been the prevalent thinking among officials in Bangladesh, where the Rohingya are not allowed to work outside of the camps or avail themselves of the country’s education system. Instead, U.N. agencies and some non-profit organizations try to provide them sources of livelihood inside the camps, as well as rudimentary education for the children.
In its latest annual World Report, however, the international rights monitor Human Rights Watch said that Bangladesh officials last year had “closed community-led schools, arbitrarily destroyed shops, and imposed new obstacles on movement, including threats, frequent curfews, and harassment at checkpoints.”
It also said that “severe movement restrictions,” as well as food and medicine shortages, and “abuses by security forces” were plaguing the remote island of Bhasan Char, where Bangladesh authorities had forced some 28,000 Rohingya refugees to move.
“It is very hard for us to find jobs, other than with the humanitarian relief agencies who work in the camp,” said Abdullah, another Rohingya refugee in a Cox’s Bazar who is using a pseudonym for this piece. “Some work as laborers but because this isn’t legal, they are forced to accept lower payments than what Bangladeshi nationals are paid.”
“The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are in a situation of imposed food dependency because they are not allowed to leave the camps, earn income, or farm land,” said Bill Frelick, director of the refugee and migrant rights division at Human Rights Watch. “This leaves two stark choices: either provide them food and other necessities for as long as they remain in the camps or, preferably and more sustainably, allow them to be productive by lifting the restrictions that have rendered them dependent on humanitarian assistance.”
Avinash Kumar, fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies and former head of Amnesty International in India, meanwhile argued that while Bangladesh is being supported internationally for allowing a large number of Rohingya refugees to take shelter on its soil, “it should not just shirk away from that responsibility but should commit to find better ways to treat them.
“It should give them basic health and education services,” he added, “alongside facilitating them to find alternative means of livelihoods.” Kumar also said that at this point, it is critical for host nations to find collective solutions to such issues, “in the interest of their own regional and global stability.”
Sharing the burden
Bangladesh, however, has insisted that the solution to the Rohingya refugee crisis lies with Myanmar. It has been trying to start a repatriation program for the Rohingya in the last few years, but it has yet to push through with it. For one, the Rohingya want to return to their homeland only if they have full citizenship rights – which Myanmar has not yet offered them. For another, Myanmar’s ongoing civil war and the still hostile attitudes in the Rohingya’s home state of Rakhine are certainly not ideal for such repatriation.
In February, Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dr A.K. Abdul Momen spoke about this impasse, which has led to various security challenges for Bangladesh and the region. Momen noted that Bangladesh is a small, population-dense country with development concerns of its own, and the prolonged presence of 1.2 million displaced Rohingya “is not tenable in any consideration.”
Last September in New York, at a side event on the Rohingya crisis, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made her own appeal to the international community not only for financial aid for the Rohingya refugees, but also for political support for them. Underlining Myanmar’s crucial role in ending the crisis, she asked the world community to help ensure that rights violations are reduced, if not stopped altogether, in Myanmar, including those committed against ethnic and religious minorities.
“The protracted stay of Rohingya in Bangladesh poses enormous challenges to our development aspiration,” the online Daily Star quoted Hasina as saying. “The hosting of 1.2 million Rohingya has flared into various fronts. We have to spend US$1.2 billion every year for the Rohingya.”

According to the World Bank, Bangladesh remains “on track to graduate from the U.N.’s Least Developed Countries (LDC) list in 2026.” But with some three more years to go before that happens, the South Asian country has been receiving international aid to help it host the Rohingya.
U.N. data show that for 2023, about 27 percent of the US$875.9 million required to carry out the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis Joint Response Plan has been allotted for Bangladesh. Another US$30.8 million for the country is supposed to be funded outside of the Plan. The data indicate that while the allotment for Bangladesh has been met, the rest of the Plan’s funding, or 73.1 percent, remained “unmet” as of July 2023.
Last May, the Associated Press quoted U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Olivier De Schutter as saying that the international response to funding the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh was “grossly insufficient.”
“Bangladesh should not be left to shoulder the burden of the presence of the refugees on its own,” Schutter also said. “These (U.N.) agencies should be much better supported in their work.”
Sources at WFP say that they are working overtime to convince donors of the need to urgently revise the recent ration cut, and revert to US$12 as soon as possible. As of 15 May, WFP urgently needed US$56 million to restore full rations for Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar until the end of 2023. By mid-June, the Japanese government had pledged a further US$4.4 million in food assistance to the Rohingya. More aid is expected from other donor nations, but the huge cost of covering ever-growing humanitarian budgets and having such a large refugee population dependent on dole in a developing country remains.
“No food, no life, no security”
Until WFP achieves its immediate goal, the Rohingya refugees will have to somehow survive on US$0.27 per day. Commented Abdullah: “First the Cyclone Mocha damaged our house and the food ration was cut to US$10. I used our meagre savings for house repairs and I started going fishing late at night to supplement our food even though we were not permitted to do this. Now the rations have been further cut and the monsoons have come. It is raining so much that fishing has become harder. What are we going to do?”
He echoed other Rohingya in saying that there may be far-ranging consequences of the current food crisis.
“When there is no food, there’s no life, there’s no security,” said Abdullah, who has been in Cox’s Bazar with the rest of his family since 2017. “I see children going to work instead of to school, I hear parents wanting to marry off their daughters so there are fewer mouths to feed, and all of us hear gossip about people who are missing, perhaps trafficked.”

He also said that in desperation, some Rohingya may attempt hazardous sea crossings and shady overland routes to reach Malaysia and Indonesia, both Southeast Asian nations that have Muslim majorities like Bangladesh, but are more prosperous.
“I see so many men my age, they’re here one day, but have disappeared the next,” Abdullah said. “We can only guess that they’ve gone to other countries, and pray that they reach safely.” ◉
Research for this story was made possible by the Solutions Journalism Network’s LEDE Fellowship 2023 grant.