Nov 11, 2009, Irrawaddy news,
COX’S BAZAAR, Bangladesh – Since the Burmese military regime came to power in 1988, refugees have poured over the Naf River from Arakan State to seek asylum in neighboring Bangladesh. The majority of these refugees have been Rohingya Muslims who human rights groups argue are fleeing ethnic cleansing by the ruling State Peace and Development Council.
However, the Rohingya are not the only ethnic people in Arakan State fleeing persecution from the Burmese government and its armed forces; thousands of Arakanese Buddhists, commonly called Rakhine, have also fled to Bangladesh where their plight has largely been forgotten by the international community.
“We get very little assistance and, when we do, it usually ends up being hard to receive and full of complications,” said Thant Sin who, like everyone The Irrawaddy spoke to in interviews for this article, requested to use a false name.
A student organizer during the 1996 uprising in Sittwe, Thant Sin knew that if he remained in Burma and was caught by the security forces, he would have received a lengthy prison sentence. He escaped, hiking through the jungle for 15 days not knowing what he would do when he reached Bangladesh.
“I didn’t know anything about Bangladesh or what I would do there, but I knew I had to escape,” he said.
Thant Sin has registered with the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, and has received a UN identity card, which states in English and Bengali that the holder should not be forcefully repatriated to Burma. However, he said he does not feel much safer because of numerous reported incidents of Bangladeshi police ripping up Rakhine refugees’ cards and forcing them to pay bribes.
Bangladesh has not acceded to the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, leaving all the country’s refugees in a legal limbo and lacking protection.
Thant Sin expressed a common belief among Buddhist refugees in Bangladesh that the Bangladeshi authorities are not prepared to help them because of their religion.
“If we were Muslims it would be different. We would be allowed to go into the camps and benefit from the assistance and security they receive,” he explained. “There’s no difference between us—we’re all refugees who have left Burma because of oppression and forced labor. Why can’t we be treated the same?”
Rakhine refugees are processed differently from the Rohingya and are granted “urban refugee” status. Their office of contact is in Dhaka, some 370 km [230 miles] from Cox’s Bazaar, and they complain this is too far for them to travel, with their transport costs seldom refunded.
The UNHCR used to provide Rakhine refugees with a small allowance, but this has been discontinued, except in special cases.
Arjun Jain, the senior protection officer for the UNHCR in Dhaka, told The Irrawaddy that the agency is trying to build the confidence of the refugees so they can become more self-reliant.
“We have stopped giving out as many allowances as we did before, because we saw this wasn’t effective,” he said. “We feel it’s important to develop the capacity of the refugees so they don’t feel dependent on the UNHCR.”
However, Thant Sin said that it’s impossible for the Rakhine—the largest ethnic group in Arakan State— to make a living or open a business in Bangladesh because locals “won’t buy from an Arakanese shop.
“Nor can we get work permits,” he added.
One family told The Irrawaddy how they had opened a grocery store a couple of years ago with a grant from the UNHCR. Six months later, they had to close the store because none of the locals would shop there, despite it having the lowest prices in the area.
Relations with the locals are a major concern for the Rakhine refugees. Often the Arakanese try to conceal their Burmese origins, but have problems with the Bengali language. Most of the long-term refugees pretend to be Bangladeshi Rakhine in order to avoid abuse from the locals who see Burmese refugees as a heavy burden on their underdeveloped country’s economy.
Even Buddhist monks from Arakan State are not immune to abuse. “When we walk past, they shout ‘Barmajar’ at us, labeling us refugees from Burma,” Ashin Thawbanar , a monk leader during the Saffron Revolution, told The Irrawaddy from his monastery in Cox’s Bazaar.
“When we are collecting our morning alms and we hear them shouting that, we feel threatened and humiliated,” he said.
Ashin Thawbanar spent months in hiding from the Burmese authorities after the monk-led uprising was violently put down by Burma’s security forces in 2007. Feeling he had run out of places to go, he was forced to seek refuge in Bangladesh.
However, when he applied to the UNHCR in Dhaka his case was rejected on the grounds that some criteria were not met in the interview.
He told The Irrawaddy that the UN interviewer questioned how he was able to flee Burma if indeed security was so tight.
He was left in Bangladesh without any assistance and, most importantly, without a UN card which he feels is necessary to travel safely and receive alms—the food a Buddhist monk survives on.
“We hear stories of ‘urban refugees’ being arrested by the police for no reason,” he said. “I heard of one man who was killed because he was Burmese. It makes us afraid every time we go outside.”
He said that he appealed against the UN decision in March but still hasn’t received anything, not even a letter from the UNHCR to confirm they had received his claim.
“I’ve given up hoping for anything. I can’t go back to Burma and I can’t leave Bangladesh. I’m stuck here,” he said.
Some refugees The Irrawaddy spoke to claim the UNHCR currently has close to a 100 percent rejection rate toward Rakhine refugees, and believe the agency is trying to keep numbers down to avoid upsetting the Bangladeshi government.
Nay Htoo, an economics student from Sittwe, was in his final year of university when he and four friends participated in the “Vote No” campaign against the 2008 constitutional referendum. Following a crackdown on university students he fled to Bangladesh to escape Burmese military intelligence.
Having applied to be recognized as a UN refugee, he was surprised to find out that only one of the people in his group had been accepted and the rest rejected.
“I don’t really understand how that is possible,” he said. “We all came together and had the same story, but they said three of us were not telling the truth.”
The UNHCR’s Arjun Jain told The Irrawaddy that rejections had increased in the last year and suggested that some of the refugees were being tutored what to say before their interviews. He said that all decisions are made “exceptionally carefully” and that they re-open cases if they believe a mistake has been made.
For the refugees who are accepted, very few families have been allowed to resettle in third countries. Desperate to leave Bangladesh, three Rakhine families held a hunger strike outside the UNHCR Dhaka office in October, demanding a response to their resettlement interview.
The families said they were invited by UNHCR for resettlement interviews two years before at the Cox’s Bazaar office, however never heard anything further, and when they requested information they were told that their interview documents had been lost.
“We travelled to Dhaka to show our displeasure that they lost our interview documents and demand action be taken,” one of the family members told The Irrawaddy.
She said she fled to Bangladesh with her family having worked on a forced labor camp in Arakan State for two years. With ailing health and insufficient money to pay off the Burmese authorities to exempt her from the work camp she felt she had to escape.
“We are suffering so much in Bangladesh,” she said. “We can’t earn enough money to survive and we all have medical problems which aren’t being properly dealt with.”
In the meantime, the UNHCR has taken over from a local NGO in looking after the “urban refugees.” It says it will be stepping up assistance to them.
However, few if any Rakhine refugees in Cox’s Bazaar expect their lot to get better in Bangladesh.
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