Deeper Roots of So-called Rohingya Problem

GAN/ Arakan (Rakhine State) April 1, 2024

Refugees in Bangladesh (Photocredit)

On March 29, 2024, the Dhaka Tribute published a news article by Sheikh Shahariar Zaman. The item was about the population volume of the self-identified Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The content goes on that the Dhaka government is seeking to utilise the Rohingya refugee database maintained by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to prevent Rohingyas from obtaining Bangladeshi identity documents.

According to the expression, it is mentioned that the database currently includes information on approximately 970,000 Rohingyas, including fingerprints of both hands and retinal scans. The population volume of the refugee community is critical as it is one of the key root causes of the crisis and there are also many inconsistent issues regarding that factor.

For instance, a release by the UNHCR on an earlier date on December 24, 2017, said that the humanitarian situation for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh remains dire, with some 655,000 refugees newly arrived since 25 August 2017.

On the other hand, a research paper titled “Bangladesh: Rohingya Refugee Crisis 2017–2018” published on May 7, 2018, said that an estimated 693 000 Rohingya people have crossed from Myanmar into Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh since August 2017, joining approximately 212,000 others who had fled in earlier waves of displacement. Three months later, a publication on August 14, 2018, mentioned that since August 2017, 707,000 new Rohingya refugees have come to Bangladesh. Combined with the old refugees, the total refugee population is nearly 1 million.

More importantly, this was only 6 years ago but the number is nearly the same with the current volume. So, the question here is why the number of refugee population is consistently inconsistent and who is controlling that number. The answer is unclear.

But, the clear answer is that the high population volume in the so-called Rohingya issue is one of the deepest roots causing the problem bigger and the international community needs to be aware of finding concrete solutions for this issue.

It is a well-known fact that the small delta country of Bangladesh is facing the problem of population explosion and due to various push factors, the residents of the country immigrated to neighbouring countries like India and Myanmar. For some of India’s Northeast States like Assam and Tripura, the injection of Bengali or Bangladeshi population into their states is posed as an existential threat to the very life of the indigenous identity and socio-economic lives of the local population.

In Myanmar, Rakhine state, mainly inhabited by the Arakanese Buddhist population and other minority indigenous groups, is the key victim of the illegal Bengali influx. Although there was a small volume of South Asia Muslim population in the pre-colonial period of Arakan, the super majority of the Bengali population migrated into Arakan only during the British colonial period via the Naff River. Then, during the War of Bangladesh Liberation in 1971, around 0.1 million refugees were expected to flee into Rakhine State, Myanmar. However, the Socialist government in Myanmar at that time was unable to take appropriate actions.

Refugees in Bangladesh (Photocredit)

Apart from the population dimension, other deeper roots like historical distortion, (Islamic) religious extremism and territorial separationism are also considered the key challenges in the peaceful resolution of the refugee crisis.