Understanding ‘refugee resettlement’ from below: Decoding the Rohingya refugees’ lived experience in Bangladesh

Abstract

While the resettlement of displaced people often denotes rehabilitation in one way or another, the paper illuminates the paradox of resettlement between repatriation and relocation with the case of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The Rohingya, considered the most persecuted ethnic minority in the world at present as per the United Nations (UN), are an ethnolinguistic and religious minority of Myanmar but at present most of them are living in Bangladesh as refugees. About 750 thousand Rohingyas fled a deadly genocidal attack perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces in 2017 and took refuge in Bangladesh. Combining with the previously living ones, Bangladesh now hosts more than 1.3 million Rohingyas as refugees in 34 temporary camps in Ukhia and Teknaf, two south-eastern sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar. This massive Rohingya presence has heavily impacted the local lives and resources and thereby the local community gradually became reluctant, though not yet hostile, to host them anymore. To accommodate the local pressure, Bangladesh made two consecutive repatriation attempts (the first one on November 15, 2018, and the second one on August 22, 2019) to send the Rohingya back to Myanmar but failed since none willingly returned to their ‘homeland’. The refusal was interpreted as non-cooperation of the international community, and non-preparation on Myanmar's part to accept the Rohingyas back and let them resume their lives safely in the Rakhine state where they used to live. Since the repatriation attempt did not work and local pressures started mounting, Bangladesh initiated a program to relocate a few thousand Rohingya families to Bhasan Char, a newly emerged island located in the Bay of Bengal under Noakhali district. Empirical data reveal that the physical facilities of Bhasan Char seem far better than the same of Ukhia and Teknaf. Still, Rohingya refugees remain reluctant to move due to their entrenched fear of cyclones, floods and tidal surges which, they believe, could wash them away anytime. The entire process of Rohingya relocation to Bhasan Char has created huge debates about whether the Island is safe-liveable for the Rohingya people since it is a twenty-year-old island and there was no experience of people living there. Still, it does not appear to be a convincing plan to resolve the displacement problem of the Rohingya refugees. Given the background, what the Rohingya people articulate their aspiration in the name of resettlement is completely missing in the entire planning and action to redress the Rohingya crisis. Empirical findings show that the majority of Rohingyas are willing to return ‘home’ if three conditions are met: legal recognition amid conferring citizenship, social safety through the deployment of UN peace troops, and human dignity so that they can enjoy all forms of human rights. So, the Rohingya perception of resettlement is repatriation with aforesaid conditions. Therefore, the paper argues that beyond the populist idea of resettlement in the form of rehabilitation or relocation, the whole discourse of resettlement could come up from the bottom and people’s perspectives which could be both crucial and instrumental in policy framing and action planning. The Rohingya refugees desire dignified repatriation with legal recognition and social safety which is largely absent in the activism of the human rights bodies and the action of the international communities as well as the state-level movements. Given the matrix of relocation and repatriation, resettlement takes a central point of discussion and debates whether resettlement could settle the Rohingya crisis in the place of migration. The paper with the experience of decade-long ethnographic research intends to rearticulate the people’s perception and ground-level view of (re)settlement to redress the Rohingya crisis in the interface of repatriation and relocation.