BANGLADESH’S ROHINGYA PROBLEM

FROM THE 40-foot-high watch tower at the highest point of the winding, up-and-down mud-and-brick road, the shantytown is seen stretching in all directions, until it fades into the monsoon mist. Tin and bamboo huts, some of them lined with blue or grey plastic sheets, cling to red mud hillsides, along with clusters oftrees, palms and shrubbery. The lanes radiating from the main road are numbered, with UNHCR and Bangladesh government signs, and the names of international aid organisations and humanitarian nonprofits. This is Kutupalong in the Ukhiya upa-zila of Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, the world’s largest refugee camp. Here, a million ofperhaps the world’s most unwanted people live cheek by jowl on a little more than 6,000 acres — 24 sq km — ofdenuded forest in which elephants roamed until recently. 700,000 Rohingya, an indigenous Muslim ethnic minority living mainly in Myanmar’s southwestern Rakhine state, fled as the country’s military launched a campaign of terror against the community, including torture, gangrape, mass executions, and the razing of hundreds of Rohingya villages. The vast majority came to Bangladesh, landing on the white sand beaches of Cox’s Bazar, or crossing the Nafriver into the country. A UN fact-finding mission concluded in 2018 that the reasons for the exodus included crimes against humanity, and accused the Myanmarese military of “genocidal intent”. The Rohingya have suffered systematic discrimination, disenfranchisement, and targeted persecution for decades — and small and large groups have been coming to Bangladesh from at least the 1970s following violence in Rakhine. Before 2017 — when the Myanmar military unleashed a brutal response to alleged attacks by a group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army — waves of Rohingya had come to Bangladesh in 1978, 1992, 2012, and 2016. As several thousand refugees, whom the Bangladesh government calls Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMNs), arrived on August 25, 2017 — and kept coming for weeks afterward — the Kutupalong camp underwent dramatic expansion. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said the Rohingya reminded her ofthe plight ofher own family and people during the 1971 war of liberation when India had opened its doors to them. IfBangladesh could feed 160 million ofits own people, it could also share its meals with the helpless victims of war crimes committed next door, she said. That was almost five years ago. There have been no fresh arrivals of Rohingya for many months now. But there has been very little progress in repatriating those who are already in Bangladesh. In the camps, peace, the absence ofviolent persecution, and the assurance offood and medical care of the kind that many Rohingya had never enjoyed earlier, have led to a sharp increase in their population. As the world has shifted its attention to crises in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia, the Rohingya are no longer discussed as frequently or with as much urgency. And Bangladesh, at last tiring under the burden ofits own generosity, is beginning to worry