This is an archival post
and translation of my 2013 account of visit to a Rohingya refugee camp located
in the vicinity of Delhi. While many of the numerical facts remain unchanged,
unfortunately the reality is that the overall situation of surrounding the
Rohingyas is even grimmer than it was in 2013.
Some time ago I learned
about Iranian filmmakers who wanted to shoot a documentary movie about numerous
Rohingya refugees from Burma, residing in and in the vicinity of Delhi. I managed to contact
them and that’s how our cooperation started, giving rise to my passion for
humanitarian affairs. These visits to the refugee camp, or more precisely,
refugee village, gave me a lot of food for thought and provided me with a
different angle to examine one of the world’s still unresolved
problems—statelessness. I have decided to share some of my feelings on the
visit to the refugee camp in the context of international law and identity
issues in order to bring to light what still remains as a largely unknown
problem to the eyes of the world.
The first part of the text
is devoted to providing basic facts about the Rohingya people and explaining
some legal intricacies of the term “refugee”, while the second is my account of
life in a refugee camp located in near India’s capital.
The movie I had a pleasure
of starring in tells a story of Rohingya refugees who as a result of their
uniqueness were forced by the persecution to flee Burma. They were not only
banished, but deprived of all their worldly possessions, the right to lead life
free from fear and in some instances even of that most valuable of them
all—life itself.
Refugee, a legal definition
Referring to the international
agreements and resolutions of international organizations, such as the Geneva
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951[1],
a refugee can in simple terms be defined as a person forced to flee from the country of his/her
permanent residence out of fear of harassment or loss of life.
The Rohingyas
The Rohingyas are an Indo-European
ethnic group actually numbering close to 1.5 million people. As a result of
decades of atrocities committed against them in Burma most of them were
violently and mercilessly forced out of Burma’s Rakhine province, which was
their home for centuries (in the distant past existing for some time in the
independent form of Arakan). In stark contrast with the country’s Buddhist
majority population the Rohingyas are mostly practitioners of Islam, have their
own distinctive culture and use their own language. Since times unmemorable they were often
commonly accused of serving as the “fifth column” of Bangladesh and despite the
long history of their residence in Burma often contemptuously termed Bangladeshis.
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| Rohingyas were traditionally subjected to a variety of special duties, which the rest of Burma’s general populace didn’t have to go through. One of them included routine check-ups of Rohingyas during which whole families were subjected to often humiliating questioning and photographs of all family members were taken. If any of the family members was absent the rest had to undergo severe punishment (often including deportation). This man's family was forced to flee Myanmar after he couldn’t attend such “census” due to his participation in the haj pilgrimage. |
The advent of the 20th
century only exacerbated existing tensions as the World War II period witnessed
many Rohingya pogroms in Burma. After the military putsch of 1962 in the country, the Rohingyas
faced ever intensified discrimination which forced them en masse to flee to
Pakistan and Bangladesh. No substantial changes in Rohingya’s legal status took place in Burma during the military rule period.
The present state of affairs
prevailing in Burma’s Rakhine province is best characterized by one word:
anarchy. Since the country’s gradual opening began in 2011 Burma has
witnessed periods of ethnic clashes often described as ethnic cleansing, the
flames of which also engulfed the province of Rakhine. As is the
case with many other communalist conflicts the world over, civilians bear the main
brunt of destruction unleashed by the government security forces in response
to attacks of local armed groups. Close to 100,000 Rohingyas became Internally Displaced Persons, known as internal refugees and
mostly dwell in temporary camps. Many of
them end up perishing from disease since the Burmese government creates many
hurdles for humanitarian organizations willing to extend them so much needed
help.
The position of the Rohingya
refugees is perilous as many of them don’t possess any proof of their identity
and documents issued to them by the Burmese authorities in the past blatantly
name them Bangladeshi citizens, which gives them no chance of return after
voluntarily leaving or being forcibly expelled from the country. While the act
of forcing them out in the eyes of the government amounts to nothing different
from merely expelling “foreigners”. This makes for a serious violation of
international agreements, for instance the 1954 Convention Relating to the
Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of
Statelessness[2]. The
only problem is that Burma hasn’t become a side to these agreements and is
therefore not formally bound to respect them. As a result, Rohingyas are
effectively not only homeless, but also stateless.
The UN High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Office in cooperation with the UN member states
issue so called Identity Cards[3]
for the refugees, which are often the only proof of their identity. The main disadvantage in
this document lies in the fact that it is not widely respected by all the
countries and even in the ones that honor it, it doesn’t award their holders with
any necessary to survive rights, such as the right to being legally employed.
In the camp of the Rohingyas
The refugee camp which I
managed to see was located in a small village called Ferozepur Namak located
some 150 kilometers from India’s Delhi. It is one of 2 camps located near the
country’s capital. Remaining Rohingya camps in India are mostly located in the
state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Quite
naturally, my first visit filled me with the utmost excitement. Not surprisingly,
newcomers were treated by the camp’s inhabitants as a novelty. After
traditional greetings, equally traditional questions followed “where are you
from”? I am from Poland I replied—it didn’t ring a bell with any of the people
gathered there. Notwithstanding that, after the few hours spent in the camp many
young people desperately wanted to know how much it would cost to get a fake
passport allowing them to enter this country, which was totally unknown to them.
This portrays well the level of desperation of people who would even try their
luck in a place totally foreign to them in a frantic search to improve their
present meager existence.
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| For many refugees the Identity Cards issued by the UNHCR are the only proofs of their identities. |
Everyday life in a refugee camp
The camp which I had a
chance to visit was organized by the refugees on their own on a plot of land
belonging to a local farmer. As one of the camps inhabitants related they have
been informed by the government that they can reside in the country, however
they shouldn’t expect any additional assistance from any of the governmental
agencies.
Most of the days look
alike here. Camp inhabitants don’t really have much to do, however the very
fact that they made it safely out of the furnace of civil strife in Burma is a
lot in itself. Naturally social roles in the camp were clearly defined and
based on the age and sex:
- Children spend most of their time in a local madrasa (Muslim school) organized in one of the barracks. They are not allowed to attend public Indian schools as they have no documents proving their identity and cannot afford to send their children to a private school. Many of them are yet too young to understand all the injustices which their families suffered, but their youthful eyes are still gleaming with innocence and childish hope.
- Men—some of them do menial tasks working on the neighboring farms, of course illegally and for the money that can’t satisfy even the most basic needs.
- Women are responsible for taking care of homes (it would be rather fitting to say shacks in this context) and often rearing numerous offspring.
Some among the camps
inhabitants receive financial support from their families living and working in
Bangladesh, while the rest have no steady source of income and own close to
nothing except for a few things taken hastily from their homes the very last
moment before fleeing the country. The overall level of education in the camp is
very low and out of some few hundred people residing there, only very few are
fully literate. As a result, many of the children have all the prospects of remaining
illiterate for the remainder of their lives. People living here are also cut off
from medical services and in case of emergency they need each time to find a
doctor or rather, a quack, that is if they are lucky enough. Their life is more
hopeless than that of Orwellian character. The world has easily come to terms
with their plight, aren’t there already millions of poor and destitute people
in the world after all?
People living here have often witnessed scenes of bestiality beyond
description
Many children witnessed
their parent’s death, while in some of the other families all of their female
members were raped. One of the most important parts of the movie I took part
in, was a trial of the children on the camps inhabitants. Using their childish
common sense, not yet tainted by the vices of the grown-ups they were about to
decide the future of camps inhabitants after carefully listening to their life
stories. As in a real courtroom, children acted as judges, public prosecutors
and lawyers. How much have these people suffered is amply illustrated by a
10-year-old boy. He and his mother were asked to testify in front of the
“court”. The boy claimed that his father remains trapped in Burma, but remains
in touch with his estranged family, however when it was his mother’s turn to
give her “court” testimony he began to shout at her “go home woman, I forbid
you to reveal our story”. As it happens boy’s father was long dead and he in
accordance with Freudian defense mechanism wanted to convince himself that it
was otherwise.
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| A shop located in the heart of the camp testifies to capitalism taking firm roots even among the poor and destitute… |
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| Some of the people possess only Myanmar issued documents declaring them citizens of Bangladesh (sic!) |
 |
| Makeshift mosque; religion is often one of the very few remnants of peoples’ former life. |
 |
All the buildings have temporary
character and privacy is not in evidence.
|
In theory
Rohingyas remain under the umbrella of various NGOs, however their help alone can’t
solve many of the systematic issues, such as lack of education or employment.
Looking at the issue, it’s
difficult to put the blame for refugees squalid living conditions solely on the
shoulders of the Indian government when keeping in mind that the country has
its indigenous population of hundreds of millions of destitute people, but the
life of Rohingyas shows how different from lofty sounding international
agreements their conditions are.
Another international problem without a clear solution in sight?
Unfortunately, life itself
has written the last chapter of this coverage. Because of indiscriminate
violence most of Rohingya people now remain displaced out of Burma. Most of
those who managed to save their life now dwell in neighboring Bangladesh, which
is itself one of the world’s poorest countries and conditions of people
populating the refugee camps can in the lightest of terms be described as appalling. The
Burmese government staunchly denies claims of the violence committed against
the Rohingya minority, claiming that Rohingyas (whose number in Burma is now close to 625,000 in 2017[4])
left the country as a result of inter-communal clashes and terrorism. Aung San
Su Kyi who in 2013 seemed to be the apostle of changes in the country has
largely avoided raising the issue of Rohingyas and both the governmental and
international commissions working on the Rohingya issue didn’t come to any
substantial conclusions.
With tense refugee
situation in other parts of the world, Rohingya’s prospects of getting asylum in other countries are even grimmer than before. Luckily, among this unspeakable outpouring of
human suffering and grief there exist groups like Khalsa Aid International, which strive to
ease the burden of pain and wash off the stains of the blood by helping
displaced. However, as the international community appeals to Myanmar to
readmit the Rohingyas, one question remains unanswered, how will their future
be safeguarded from shameful atrocities?
More on the issue:
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