The government of Bangladesh will not register the Rohingya who are currently living in squalor outside the bandustani refugee camps in Cox Bazaar.
There are already some 28,000 registered refugees in the two camps that comprise the state sanctioned shelter that has been provided the Rohingya. That space–whatever its hue–has been set aside for those over the years lucky enough to have been registered in time, before some calamity hit or violence struck to tear away this one loved life or another. In decades past, there have been at least two waves of mass migration of Rohingya into Bangladesh. In the late 1970’s over 300,000 Rohinyga sought refuge after the then Burmese Junta cracked down on them. After a similar repressive crackdown in 1993, another 250,000 fled to Bangladesh.
Indeed, only in March of this year, the advocacy organization, Physicians For Human Rights (PHR) showed that despite the government’s refusal to register the Rohingya and thereby allow them to live under in habitable shelters, those refused registration are building makeshift, unsafe camps that pose a grave threat to the public health of Bangladeshi citizens. Registering and regulating the conditions under which these people might live then strongly mitigates the possibility of a disastrous public health epidemic. There exists then a strong argument that the government should register the Rohinyga for the benefit of its own citizens.
What’s more the government is interning and expelling Rohingya across teh Myanmar border, all but assuring these people effective death sentences. Indeed, as I wrote earlier the government is acting in ways that hinders food aid delivery to the Rohinyga. The government is thus abrogating its own obligations to fulfill its own constitutionally mandates duties to uphold the human rights of person. Since the government of Bangladesh has failed to act in ways consistent with justice and in accord with its obligations to uphold the human rights of persons, PHR has called for the UNHCR to assert its mandate to protect the refugees who now suffer and bleed in those bandustans.
It is to this dilemma that I wish to turn in a following piece. How can a government obligated to protect the human rights of the persons who live within its borders, flagrantly denounce those same obligations through its actions, without sacrificing its own claim of sovereignty? What sort of concept of human rights do we then think the government means to uphold, when it arbitrarily arrests and interns Rohingya?
