A skinny finger of water separates Bangladesh from Myanmar, and the other night a group of men sat on the Bangladeshi side, peering into the darkness, wondering what was left for them.
For these men, ethnic Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar, there is certainly nothing back across the water. Home doesn’t exist anymore. Myanmar’s army wiped out their villages in August, turning their houses, their mosques, their corrals, their grain stores, their fields, even their trees into dunes of ash.
The muddy camps just inside Bangladesh, where more than 600,000 Rohingya have since fled, provide no solution, either.
Officials from Bangladesh, a very crowded country, insist that Myanmar must take the Rohingya back. But Myanmar’s Buddhist majority drove them out in the first place, creating a climate of hate that vilified the Rohingya as subhuman. Many people in Myanmar insist the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for hundreds of years.
Few ethnic groups on earth have been locked into such hopeless logic, marooned on an international border, unwanted by either side, weary, traumatized, desperately stateless, their very origins in dispute.
“The Rohingya are the wretched of the earth,” said Leonard Doyle, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, the agency helping coordinate relief efforts. “Nobody wants them. I’m talking about 7-year-olds who have witnessed their parents get their throats slit who are standing in bare feet on the border right now, asking: ‘What’s going to happen to me?’”
Bangladesh and Myanmar have held rounds of talks about what to do with the refugees, without any Rohingya representatives present. Likewise, the United Nations recently convened a major event in Geneva called the Pledging Conference for the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. Dozens of donor nations and aid agencies were invited but no Rohingya refugees.
Many Rohingya now worry that without any input from them, their fate is being sealed. It is clear where most would stand if they were consulted.
“I will never go back to Myanmar,” said an older Rohingya woman named Morjan who spends her days under a plastic sheet in a camp. After her husband and son were slaughtered in front of her, she fled to Bangladesh. “Better you kill us here,” she said.
Bangladeshi officials have circulated a draft repatriation agreement, specifying how to verify that Rohingya refugees, many of whom are illiterate and do not have a piece of paper to their name, are from Myanmar. The proposal talks of a “first batch” of returnees and even mentions logistics and transport.
But Western aid officials said privately that this was a charade. The Rohingya would not be returning to Myanmar anytime soon, the aid officials said. But nobody was allowed to come out and say that, because it could alienate Bangladesh, which clearly does not want to host the refugees indefinitely but whose good will is needed right now.
Further complicating things, analysts said, was Myanmar stalling the efforts to help the Rohingya, hardly surprising considering how this crisis started. Witnesses have described, in disturbing detail, how Myanmar’s army burned down Rohingya village after Rohingya village, terrorizing and massacring civilians — of any age, including infants — with one apparent purpose: to erase the Rohingya from the landscape.
The violence is not even over. One Rohingya advocacy group said this week that Rohingya homes were still being burned to the ground.
Each night here on the border, hundreds of Rohingya keep arriving in fleets of wooden boats that float silently across the mouth of the Naf River, the brackish waterway that separates the two countries.
A group of New York Times journalists waited in the darkness alongside worried family members as a searchlight on the Myanmar side swung back and forth, back and forth, an eerie metronome moving across the gloom.
“How can we talk about repatriation?” asked Tun Khin, one of the few Western-educated Rohingya representatives who have been able to reach out to the international news media. “People are still fleeing.”
Bangladesh now finds itself in an impossible situation. One of Asia’s poorest countries, it is home to 160 million people — half the population of the United States — squeezed into a space the size of Iowa. The Rohingya refugees have taken over hillsides, chopped down countless trees to build their shelters and put such a stress on the economy of Bangladeshi border villages that prices have shot up threefold, angering longstanding residents.
Facing international pressure to host the refugees and some domestic pressure to push them out, Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has said that her country would continue to help the refugees on humanitarian grounds but that Myanmar must “take their nationals back.”
She has ordered the army to seal off roads around the camps to make sure Rohingya do not start migrating to towns. Her government has also decreed that Rohingya were not allowed to work or register for local cellphone service.
With no way to support themselves, the Rohingya refugees are completely dependent on aid. United Nations agencies such as the World Food Program have been feeding them, while international and Bangladeshi charities have provided medical care, plastic tarps, cooking pots and other basics.
How long the Rohingya are expected to stay will affect the next set of issues, including questions like whether Bangladesh or outside groups should begin building schools for them.
Many Bangladeshis worry that the Rohingya are perfect candidates to be radicalized — victims of anti-Muslim persecution who are now idle and dispossessed. Retaliation is a theme for the Islamic State and countless other Islamist militant groups, including the Rohingya group that attacked the security forces in Myanmar on Aug. 25, the Arakhan Rohingya Salvation Army.
“If they stay where they are living now,” said Anup Kumar Chakma, a retired Bangladeshi Army officer, “the entire area will become a fertile breeding ground.”
And not only fertile for terrorist recruiters, but also for human traffickers, criminal gangs, prostitution rings — anyone who preys on the vulnerable.
For Rohingya, the conditions in Bangladesh are an uncomfortable echo of the apartheidlike system they were put under in Myanmar, the result of a long campaign of marginalization and dehumanization.
For decades, the Rohingya have been pushed around this shoulder area of Asia where the Indian subcontinent and the Southeast Asian peninsula meet. Their lowly status and history of being demonized allowed this latest crisis to happen, analysts say.
If the British had drawn the colonial border between what is now Myanmar and Bangladesh a little farther east and south, as Rohingya leaders had pleaded for after World War II, the biggest Rohingya areas would have been become part of Bangladesh. That would have made sense in several ways: the Rohingya are Muslim, like the vast majority of Bangladesh, and their language and culture are very similar.
But scholars say that to appease the majority Buddhists and get out of Myanmar as quickly as possible, the British decided to follow the old borders of an extinct Buddhist kingdom. This kept the Rohingya inside Myanmar, where most people are very different ethnically and religiously from them.
Myanmar’s leaders steadily stripped away their rights, making it extremely difficult for Rohingya to get a government job or a passport, go to school or even be legally married. Government soldiers preyed upon them; revered Buddhist monks openly called them insects and snakes.
All this, looking back on it, seems to have been building up to August, when the Rohingya suffered the most comprehensive assault on their existence.
According to dozens of witnesses and human rights groups, after Rohingya militants attacked a string of police posts — mostly using farm implements as weapons — government troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Rohingya civilians, creating a panicked exodus.
Many poured into Shah Porir Dwip, a border crossing and notorious smuggling den somewhat disguised by a collection of scruffy tea shops. It lies just across the water from Myanmar. The air smells heavy here, the odor of rotting fruit cutting through the salty breeze.
Each evening, Rohingya men sit on a crumbled walkway near the beach, waiting for family members still trying to get out. By 9 p.m., the boats usually start arriving. Without a sound, they materialize from the murk, rowing in from the Myanmar side, engines off, for stealth.
On a recent night, one of the heaviest, hundreds of Rohingya refugees splashed out. Many were quiet, and some wept as they waded ashore.
It was difficult to tell which men had reunited with their families and which had to return to the camps alone.
In the darkness, walking slowly up the beach, the group moved as one.
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