Last year, Amnesty International published numerous pieces on the Rohingya refugee crisis, a crisis that has been going on since 2015. To summarize the problem, since August 2017, over 671,000 Rohingya Muslins, an ethnic minority in Burma, have been forced out of the Burmese state of Rakhine. The Burmese government has been perpetrating numerous atrocities against the Rohingyas, including what is described by the United Nations as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, as well as numerous acts of sexual violence. Unfortunately, this is not the beginning of the oppression of the Rohingyas: they have long faced discrimination from the Burmese government, including denial of citizenship and restricted access to healthcare. Furthermore, this is not even the first wave of violence: the Rohingyas faced another onslaught of ethnic cleansing in 2012.

So what is the situation like for those lucky enough to escape Burma? Well, for the refugees currently living in Bangladesh, not so great. It could be argued that the move from Burma to Bangladesh is almost a lateral move. The Bangladeshi government has recently been restricting the freedoms of the refugees in their camps. The government ordered numerous phone companies to shut down phone service in the camps, and restricted the movement of the refugees inside the camp, allowing few people to enter and leave. This in direct violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, something that Bangladesh had agreed to. The government has also increased the military presence in the camps, supposedly to maintain order, but many refugees have stated that they are being harassed by the officers.

Even worse, the Bangladeshi government has banned certain NGO aid organizations from assisting at the camps, further worsening the squalor in which the refugees are forced to live. The government even asked two foreign aid workers to leave the country and suspended three government officials for allowing the refugees to state a rally in Kutupalong Camp. And it isn’t just the state of life in the camps that the Bangladeshi government is affecting. There have been instances of alleged Rohingya refugees committing crimes in Bangladesh and being killed by police soon after, such as in the murder of Omar Faruk. Faruk was a leader in the youth wing of the Awami League, a major political party in Bangladesh, and was killed, allegedly by Rohingya refugees according to the police. Four Rohingya refugees were later killed by the police, allegedly in ‘crossfire’. All in all, the struggles faced by the Rohingya Muslims will not simply disappear once they leave their country, and often leaving the country may not even be safer than staying behind. If something is to be done, the global community will need to stop the violence at its core (ie. in Burma), and not simply urge others to take in the refugees, because as is seen from the issues in Bangladesh, not all countries will be so welcoming.