If Bangladesh turns away, so will the world

At any other time, if hundreds of refugees fleeing genocide were starving at sea with nowhere to go, there would be widespread condemnation. Unfortunately, the pandemic that has swept across the world has relegated this issue into being a mere footnote in our news.

In the early hours of April 16, Bangladesh rescued 396 Rohingya refugees who were adrift at sea for around two months after being turned away by Malaysia, according to an Al Jazeera report. The videos that emerged were harrowing—a terrified crowd of mostly women and children huddling together, their emaciated bodies reminiscent of refugees in 1971, or the famine of 1943. Survivors told the BBC that they drank sea water to survive, and the bodies of the dead were pushed into the sea. Médecins Sans Frontières, which treated about 400 survivors, said the passengers were mostly aged between 12 and 20, and more than 70 people died on the boat.

Now, there are confirmed reports of at least two more fishing trawlers with more than 500 Rohingya refugees adrift for more than ten weeks, trapped somewhere in between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. While there have been reports of 43 of these refugees landing on Bangladesh's coast on May 2—the Arakan Project monitoring group suggests they escaped from one of the trawlers on a smaller boat—there are still hundreds remaining on the vessels that have been called "modern day slave ships", completely at the mercy of their human traffickers. Both Malaysia and Bangladesh, who have in the past shown exemplary moral authority in taking in the Rohingya, have turned away from these refugees.

This was not always the case. In August 2017, when the Myanmar military crackdown—which was subsequently described as "textbook ethnic cleansing" in a UN report— forced over 700,000 Rohingya men, women and children to flee to Bangladesh, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina famously said "if my government can arrange food for over 160 million people of Bangladesh, we can also feed one million people more." Bangladesh's decision to open the borders saved thousands of desperate people from falling victim to genocide—and as the stories of the Myanmar army and their local collaborators hunting down Rohingya men, raping women, burning mosques and razing whole villages to the ground were reported in local media, the people of Bangladesh also showed great sympathy for the world's most persecuted minority.

However, as time went on, we saw a perceptible "refugee fatigue" set in, especially in the host community in Cox's Bazaar. Bangladesh's policy went from solidarity and an "open arms" approach to insisting on repatriation, building a wall around the refugee camps, restricting education opportunities for Rohingya children, limiting internet and mobile services in the camps and generally doing everything possible to make life unpleasant for refugees and "encourage" them to go home. The fact that "home" no longer existed for most of these refugees, and return would mean almost certain death, was erased from the narrative. Local media outlets played a shameful role in changing the perception of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, taking every opportunity to label them as drug dealers and "disturbers of the peace". That a population of 1.1 million could be anything beyond the desperate/dangerous binary, and that the Rohingya could contribute to society and if given the opportunity, use their voices to rise up and fight injustice—was quickly forgotten.

Ironically, the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, while leading to many sweeping statements about the importance of solidarity and building a new world based on community feeling—has also led to populations that are usually "othered" into becoming even more susceptible to victimisation. This is most obvious in Malaysia, where Covid-19 fears have created xenophobic campaigns against refugees and undocumented migrants, and have led to the Malaysian authorities rounding up and detaining hundreds, including children. Let us not forget that this population may also include our own workers—an estimated two lakh Bangladeshi workers in Malaysia are undocumented—who are facing an imminent food crisis, according to a report in this daily. However, in Malaysia, human rights activists and community leaders have spoken out against this targeting of vulnerable populations, with the phrase "Migran juga manusia" (migrants are humans too) trending on social media. President of the People's Justice Party Anwar Ibrahim asked the Malaysian government to "safeguard our humanity", saying there is no excuse to condemn to death the hundreds of Rohingya refugees at sea. It is appalling that in Bangladesh, no such kind words have been spoken, even by development professionals and activists who have been working with the refugee crisis in recent years.

Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen's comment—"It's not the responsibility of Bangladesh alone to take care of all the stateless people of the planet Earth; ask the global leaders"—is not an unjustified one, although one would hope for a more sensitive tone from a state representative when discussing starving refugees. There are seven other countries sharing the seas that the Rohingya are now trapped on—India, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Myanmar has used the pandemic as an opportunity to strengthen its aggressive nationalism, all but leaving ethnic minorities out of the scant government efforts to deal with the virus. If persecuted populations feel even greater pressure and choose this time to try and reach better shores, then their policy has worked.

India is primarily concerned with realpolitik—Myanmar is their gateway to Southeast Asia and rival China already has a strong presence there, not to mention the current pro-Hindutva regime has little interest in speaking out for Muslim refugees. Myanmar's communal sentiments are mirrored in Sri Lanka—in 2017, the few Rohingya refugees who live in Sri Lankan shelters were attacked by Buddhist monks and hardline nationalists. Human Rights Watch has termed the Thai government's policy towards asylum seekers as "inhumane" and "racist". Singapore is Myanmar's second largest trading partner in the region, and despite being the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia last year called for the world to "stop pointing fingers" after the Gambia took Myanmar to the International Court of Justice (although the local population of Aceh have been known to shelter Rohingya refugees despite government policy to refuse asylum seekers), according to the Jakarta Post.

In this situation, Malaysia and Bangladesh are the Rohingyas only hope in the region. The Bangladesh government's stance—that the more refugees we take in, the more they will be pushed out of Myanmar—is flawed; there have already been decades-long efforts to displace the Rohingya, and whether they drown at sea or languish in camps is of no concern to Myanmar. Bangladesh had already made plans to relocate refugees to Bhashan Char, and those recently rescued on the coast are reported to have been taken there already for quarantine. If we have the space, why not rescue the rest, especially when we know most of them are likely to be women and children who are victims of trafficking? If we have the capacity to send rice and vegetables to the UAE—a country that is notorious for its treatment of our own migrant workers—can we not, with the help of international agencies, provide for a starving population? As a nation where ten million of its people once became refugees, can we not understand the desperation that drove these people to sea, and reach out a hand of kindness during Ramadan?

We can make many rational arguments against the disproportionate responsibility shouldered by Bangladesh, and we can demand for the UNHCR and other international agencies to provide us with greater support. We can engage in diplomatic talks with our allies in the region who have consistently turned away from the Rohingya, and we can hold talks with ASEAN and OECD countries about the fate of these refugees. We can appeal to international courts to hold Myanmar to account, and we can call out the hypocrisy of nations and blocs (such as the EU) that "request" Bangladesh to take in refugees but continue to trade with the oppressive regime in Myanmar. But we can only do this if we continue to exercise our moral conscience as a nation and share with the most desperate refugees, whatever little we have.

According to the UNHCR, the economic effects of hosting refugees are mostly felt in poorer countries. The GDP per capita in Uganda and Ethiopia are less than half of Bangladesh's—yet they host more refugees than us. It is the way of the world that those who have the least to give, are the ones who give more. During the pandemic, there has been a lot of talk of building a kinder world—the optimist in me believes we have already started this project, if the extent of appreciation shown for essential workers is anything to go by. But we cannot build this world if we are going to leave refugees behind, abandoning them to starve at sea for fears of spreading Covid-19. Maybe it is time to put rational arguments aside and focus on our capacity for kindness. The refugees trapped at sea are dying by the hour—by rescuing them, we will be rescuing our own humanity.

Shuprova Tasneem is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.

Her Twitter handle is @ShuprovaTasneem.