LIKE many other countries, World Refugee Day was observed in the country on Wednesday at a time when the world’s third largest refugee group Rohingya is living in the overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar. The UNHCR reported that 68.5 million people are living in different refugee camps across the world. Of them, the 2.7 million people, who fled violence in their home countries in 2017, more than 10, 00,000 were from South Sudan, 745,000 from Syria and 6, 55,000 from Myanmar. People who fled South Sudan and Syria and took shelter in other countries are not stateless and are free to return to their homelands once the conflicts are over.
But the situation of the Rohingyas is different. The Rohingyas are stateless because of the restrictive provisions and applications of a citizenship law, which primarily confers citizenship on the basis of race. Rohingyas are victims of Myanmar’s state discrimination, violence, persecution, marginalisation, and denial of a wide range of basic human rights. Over 7 lakh Rohingyas entered Bangladesh amid military crackdown since August last year, raising the number of stateless Rohingyas here to 11 lakhs.
The Rohingyas want guarantee of citizenship, deployment of UN peacekeepers before returning to their homes that were burnt during the military operation. Due to geopolitics — with the UN Security Council divided over any resolution against Myanmar — the fate of the Rohingyas hangs in the balance.
Presently, ten countries hosting the majority of the refugees include Bangladesh, Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Lebanon, Iran, Germany, Sudan, Ethiopia and Jordan. However, fourteen countries are now pioneering a new blueprint for responding to refugee situations and a new Global Compact on Refugees will be ready for adoption by the United Nations General Assembly soon.
The truth is that no one becomes a refugee by choice but the rest of us can have a choice about how to help them. Here, governments of developed countries have a duty to help them but most rich countries are still treating refugees as somebody else’s problem.
We think, the only real option for tackling the refugee crisis is to address the causes of people’s displacement where global and regional superpowers could play a vital role.
