Malaysian Rohingya Refugees Sosaity (MRS)

Muhammad Rafique can't deny his hopes have been boosted by the Malaysia deal, but tears well up in his eyes as he explains that 15 years as a refugee have taught him not to be so foolish as to trust such feelings.

On the walls inside the squalid shack where he lives with his wife and young child are a map of Burma and a poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The 34-year-old, an ethnic Rohingya who arrived in Malaysia from Burma when he was 19, is desperate to know whether he and his family might be among the 4000 refugees that will be resettled in Australia.

Under the deal signed in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, Australia will resettle 1000 bona-fide refugees a year over four years, in exchange for Malaysia taking the next 800 asylum seekers that arrive in Australia by boat.

But Rafique and his family are just three among more than 90,000 refugees in Malaysia.

"I want to go to Australia with my family. I hope to have a chance to go to Australia," he said.

It's obvious when he speaks that he sees their chances as bleak.

His English is poor and, having been a refugee for his entire adult life, Rafique has no skills.

He believes his chances are even poorer because the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which will have input into who makes it into the 4000, "doesn't like to send Muslim people to Australia".

"I am worried the UNHCR don't want to pick me and my family. I fear the UNHCR will not want to listen to me."

Unlike the 800 asylum seekers that will be transferred from Australia, Rafique has no rights to work or access to education.

He has little access to health care, and like many of the refugees waiting in a long queue in Malaysia, Rafique suffers from anxiety and depression brought on by the parlous life he and his family live, and their uncertain future.

A study by the non-government organisation, Health Equity and Initiatives (HEI), in March this year found that 70 per cent of asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia suffered symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress as a result of human trafficking, forced labour and unemployment.

Xavier Pereira, the director of HEI, said the figure was three times higher than in any normal population.

"Both men and women are equally affected, especially those who are unemployed, involved in human trafficking and forced labour," he said.

The level of anxiety was much higher among those who were yet to be granted refugee status, according to the study of 1074 asylum seekers and refugees, aged between 18 to 70 years.

Rafique has been ripped off by agents that have promised to help with resettlement in another country, and he admits to having paid a people smuggler in a failed attempt to make it to Australia on a boat.

He cannot return to Burma, according to Amnesty International, because as he is from the Rohingya minority, the Burmese authorities would refuse to grant him citizenship, rendering him stateless.

In Burma, he would suffer from systematic persecution, including forced labour, forced eviction, land confiscation, and severe restrictions on freedom of movement.

He says he will now do the right thing and wait, and hope for a chance of resettlement in Australia.

But he says others will still pay people smugglers and get on the boats in a perilous crossing to Australia, despite the deal with Malaysia meaning that within 72 hours, they will be sent back.

"They will still go, whatever chance they have, they must try to go, even if it means they go to the back of the queue," Rafique said.

Karlis Salna, AAP South-East Asia Correspondent

Bangladesh: Myanmar refugees weave together self-reliance and hope

FARUK PARA, Bangladesh, (UNHCR) – Kil Cer, a shy, petite 34-year Chin refugee from Myanmar, can be found every morning weaving blankets along with five other women in the village community centre in this remote lush green village in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

But they're not just turning out the colourful traditional blankets their mothers and grandmothers have always made. In their own quiet way they've woven together a small-scale economic revolution in the settlement of 700, liberating their families from debt and dependence on handouts.

"I am happy now," says Kil Cer. "Before, it was a difficult struggle." Largely because of Kil Cer's weaving skills, her community has paid back all their debts. They are able to take care of their families without UNHCR's support and have invested money in other businesses, such as banana plantations, that also employ the local Bangladeshi host community, known as the Bawm.

"We speak almost the same language as they do and they have been very good to us," Kil Cer, a mother of two, says about her hosts.

Behind the success is a new UNHCR approach to developing self-reliance as part of UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres's focus on refugees living outside camps. Learning from earlier projects that gave grants to refugees who did not have the proper skills or business education to use the money properly, UNHCR began relying on the expertise of local businesses to develop the skills of refugees in Bangladesh living outside camps.

Eight months ago, Kil Cer and other refugees in the village were heavily in debt after many of their projects – small rice mills, grocery shops and farming – failed. For many years, they had relied on UNHCR to pay their rent and give them money for basic commodities. Even when Kil Cer tried to support herself with weaving, she was only able to earn US$2 per blanket – hardly enough to cover her expenses.

"Like many girls in Myanmar, I was taught to weave by my mother in Myanmar when I was 15 years old," she says. In Bangladesh, she began weaving blankets and passed on the skill to a few other young women, both refugees and Bangladeshis.

The turning point came when UNHCR introduced her to Samantha Morshed, chief executive officer of Hathay Bunano, a company that was already employing rural Bangladeshi women and other disadvantaged people to make soft toys for the international market under fair trade rules. She provided free professional advice to Kil Cer and her team on improving their products and marketing them, to make best use of a UNHCR start-up loan of US$250.

Today their offerings include shawls, scarves, ponchos, baby blankets, picnic blankets, bedspreads and bags marketed under Expression in Exile, a brand that is becoming popular with the urban elite in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. Within a month, they made a profit of US$800, a substantial amount for the residents of Farak Pura, and today demand is outstripping supply.

"I was excited when I first saw the blankets from Expression in Exile and am happy to give the group a little direction in terms of colours, sizes, pricing and raw materials," says Morshed. "I see no reason why these blankets cannot achieve mainstream export sales in the near future."

Now that her daily needs are taken care of, Kil Cer is already looking to a future she could scarcely have dreamed of a year ago. "I want to invest the money in my children's education," she says. Her 19-year-old colleague, Siang Khin Par, has similar high hopes: "I do this because I would like to be self-reliant. I would like to learn computing and English."

UNHCR Representative in Bangladesh Saber Azam says the programme is paying benefits not only for the refugees but for Bangladesh as well.

"Ensuring that refugees are able to take care of themselves and their communities is often a more humanitarian activity than giving them free hand-outs for years," he says. "Kil Cer has also demonstrated how refugees can help their Bangladeshi hosts rather than being a burden on them."

By Jelvas Musau in Faruk Para and Arjun Jain in Dhaka, Bangladesh

RSM Malaysia History For Rohingya Live... Under the tormenting sun in Teknaf, on the southeastern tip of Bangladesh, Ahmed puts us straight: it is really all about love. His wife stands next to him in his tarpaulined shop in the unofficial Kutupalong refugee camp in southern Bangladesh. He came here, Ahmed says, to marry his childhood sweetheart, fleeing what Physicians for Human Rights, a watchdog group, describes as ‘flagrant and widespread human rights abuses’ that condemned Ahmed to having to pay an exorbitant bribe just to marry. Today, his 18-month-old baby crawls over small packets of paan and snacks on sale, mimicking his father’s voice unknowingly, describing the indescribable – how Rohingya women were told by the Burmese military that, in order to marry, they would have to have an implant rendering them infertile.

The Dhaka government has long been aware of the ethnic tensions in the Rohingya’s native Arakan state on western Burma. Indeed, by all accounts, the junta has actively fostered this situation over the years; for decades, the Rohingya community – Muslims in a Buddhist-dominated country – has been denied even the most basic of citizenship rights. But in the run-up to Burma’s national elections last November, evidently in the hopes of garnering votes, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) promised the Rohingya the citizenship rights
they crave.

Today, Salim Ullah of the exile-based Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO) describes these as ‘lots of sweet promises’. He notes that in Maung Daw, the regional centre from where the Rohingya hail, the central mosque is still un-repaired, a symbol of the community’s difference from the majority Buddhists. While the mosque had long ago fallen into disrepair, fixing it had reportedly been forbidden by the government. Prior to the election, however, the USDP had promised the community that the mosque would be fixed, in an attempt to combat the local (allegedly anti-Rohingya) party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party.

Instead, the military is today busily constructing a 300 km fence between Bangladesh and Burma. Like Israel’s wall bordering the West Bank, this will be a monument to divided peoples – an electrified fence carrying current between two territories where very few houses can boast of electric lights. For the most part, Bangladeshis seem somewhat bemused by what is taking place across the border. From the Bangladeshi side, Burma seems a dark and confusing place; but the Burmese border force, known as Nasaka, is viewed with trepidation, its fence and security posts ominously overlooking the sleepy Bangladeshi villages.

Ethnic cauldron
Recently, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been making attempts at building relations with her Burmese counterparts, new and old. This has prompted an attempt – particularly being pushed by the Bangladeshi side – at a rail link between the countries and onward, from Chittagong to Kunming, in China. For this, Prime Minister Hasina laid a foundation stone at the beginning of April near Cox’s Bazar near Chittagong – though this is a dream that many believe is not shared by the hermetic Burmese rulers next door. This has been the case with Bangladeshi pleas for natural gas from their well-endowed neighbour, a saga that has seen the Burmese stringing both India and Bangladesh along as both Dhaka and New Delhi in recent years have tried to endear themselves to the generals in Naypyidaw.

In mid-April, the new Burmese ambassador to Bangladesh, U Min Lwin, made oblique reference to the Rohingya, suggesting publicly that the two countries would need to solve the issues with ‘discussion’. The ambassador made the statement on presenting his credentials to President M Zillur Rahman. Since then, Dhaka officials have gone about ‘solving’ the problem by blocking a joint UN initiative to provide humanitarian assistance worth some USD 33 million to locals and Rohingya refugees. Purportedly, the reason for this decision is due to anxieties in Dhaka that the project would inflame ethnic tensions within Bangladesh.

The project would have seen collaboration between four UN agencies, including the High Commissioner for Refugees. In Bangladesh, some 28,000 Rohingya have been recognised as refugees, but thousands more continue to flood over the border; more than 6000 are said to have come since last fall. The state of the Rohingya in Bangladesh is not only a situation of political trauma; rather, as Physicians for Human Rights noted in a recent report, acute hunger levels in Kutupalong are around 18 percent, despite the situation being considered an ‘emergency’ for the past two decades. The report found that as upwards of 55 percent of children in Kutupalong suffer from severe diarrhoea, a life-threatening condition in such impoverished circumstances.

The new international project, then, could have played a significant role. Currently, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the French medical group, provides a single clinic, near Khutapalong, which is mandated to treat a local Bangladeshi for every refugee. This facility is strictly out of bounds for journalists, who are referred instead to an office in Amsterdam where a spokesperson declares the situation to be ‘very delicate’. A teacher (and refugee) at the camp, Rakib, is more candid, complaining that the clinic has a habit of prescribing a single paracetamol tablet for most complaints. Nonetheless, MSF officials do corroborate that those Rohingya who have yet to be officially recognised as refugees are ‘most vulnerable’ and ‘live under terrible conditions’ with ‘acute healthcare needs.’

A Finance Ministry official in Dhaka, commenting on the blocking of the UN project while not wanting to be named, noted recently in the local press, ‘Instead of helping to cut poverty in the region, the UN project would only increase tension between the Rohingyas and the locals. No doubt, it would infuriate the local people.’ Therefore, to avoid any resentment of refugees being overly-coddled an impasse has been reached, and nothing will happen beyond, perhaps, the construction of the new fences or Dhaka’s railway dream.

Ethnic rivalry and nationalistic resentment became a political issue in early June, when Foreign Minister Dipu Moni accused the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of giving certain members of the Rohingya community Bangladeshi passports. Indeed, one commentator accused the BNP of giving out as many as 40,000 such papers, allegedly in exchange for votes – mirroring the USDP’s use of the Rohingya in Burma. Interestingly, there is a flip side to this ethnic rivalry: some are now forecasting that Bangladeshis in countries such as Saudi Arabia will claim to be Rohingya in order to receive asylum.

Enmity already lies just beneath the surface of even those with the privilege of education in Bangladesh. Professor Mushtiaq Ahmed, based in Cox’s Bazar, is indignant at the suggestion that the Rohingya are persecuted by locals. ‘This is a downright falsehood,’ he said. ‘Rather, the Rohingya people have been creating problems in [Bangladesh’s] law-and-order situation – most of them are thieves, dacoits, killers. You can hire a Rohingya man to kill a man here!’

Such tensions surfaced publicly when a high-ranking US official, Eric P Schwartz, visited Dhaka in mid-June. Responding to Schwartz’s request for Dhaka to register to the Rohingya as refugees, Minister for Food Abdur Razzaque asked, ‘If they are registered, what will happen to those who will infiltrate later?’ Razzaque added, ‘It is not possible for a poor country like Bangladesh to take care of many Rohingya refugees for a long time … [Western countries] are asking Bangladesh to increase support to the Rohingyas, keeping the problem alive.’

Open-air prisons
Even as acute hunger stalks the Rohingya in Bangladesh, Refugees International claims that a climate of ‘impunity’ pervades the area around the camps. Women and girls are said to be victims of regular sexual harassment from Bangladeshis when they leave what Physicians for Human Rights describe as ‘open-air prisons’. This assessment is corroborated by Tin Soe, the editor of Kaladan Press, an online Rohingya news network. He claims that women and girls are harassed or raped regularly when they leave the camps to collect firewood in the nearby forests.

Still, one refugee, Fatima, who came from Maungdaw in the early 1990s, says that she is at peace. Although her mournful, distant look bellies some of her words, she says she does not want to take to the seas, as many Rohingya before have done, attempting to float to Thailand or even Australia. The beatings and harassment that her fellow residents receive for trying to leave the camp for work is insignificant compared to what she says she experienced earlier. In 1992, Fatima fled Burma after what Refugees International describes as a racial purge by the military. She claims that one morning the Nasaka border troops came to her home, where she lived with her eight-month-old son. The soldiers asked for the toddler’s identification and, because she lacked paperwork for her son or citizenship papers for herself, Fatima says the troops burned her son to death and torched her property.

In such a context, despite the difficulties faced by her community on a daily basis, Fatima sees the Bangladeshis as her saviours, and expresses her immense gratitude. Horror stories are everywhere in Khutapalong; but among the improvised huts and hungry children, Fatima has found some peace, while Ahmed’s content child is a monument to his love.

~ Joseph Allchin is a journalist working out of Southeast Asia, covering Burma and the region.

KUALA LUMPUR, (RSM).Malaysia — Malaysia and Australia sealed a pact Monday, July 25, to swap refugees in a contentious new strategy aimed at deterring asylum seekers from undertaking perilous boat journeys to Australia.

The deal will see Australia send 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia over the next four years in exchange for Australia resettling 4,000 registered refugees currently languishing in this Southeast Asian nation.
Both governments announced the deal in May but were forced to fine-tune it amid objections by opposition politicians in their countries and human rights groups that criticize the treatment of about 93,000 refugees now living in Malaysia, which has not signed the U.N. Convention on Refugees.

Malaysian Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein and Australian Immigration Minister Chris Bowen signed the agreement at a Kuala Lumpur hotel, where about 15 opposition-backed activists gathered to protest the plan.

Hishammuddin pledged that asylum seekers sent to Malaysia would be treated according to the U.N. refugee agency’s international standards. They will be placed at a processing center for six weeks before being allowed to live in public.

“The allegation that Malaysia is not fair toward refugees in this country is completely untrue,” Hishammuddin said.

Most of the refugees now in Malaysia are Myanmarese people who fled persecution in their country.

They are not officially allowed to work or go to school, but most do so illegally, risking detention and whippings with a rattan cane if they are caught.

Australia has long drawn people from poor, often war-ravaged places hoping to start a new life, with more than 6,200 asylum seekers arriving by boat last year. Most are from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran and Iraq, and they use Malaysia or Indonesia as a transit point for traveling to Australia.

Australian authorities say the deal with Malaysia is meant to send a message to potential asylum seekers that it will not accept any more of them.