TEKNAF, Bangladesh — “I’ve lost everything in my life and now I can only pray that I don’t get sent back to Burma,” Haziqah, a 27-year-old female Rohingya refugee, told The Irrawaddy from her half-built mud hut in the unofficial Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh.
Before coming to the camp, Haziqah lived in the Bandarban Hill Tract, about 150 km to the north, where many Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Burma have settled. She had just given birth at the time, and so was unable to work, but she and her husband managed to survive on the meager wages he earned from odd jobs in the area.
However, their hopes of leading a quasi-normal existence were crushed when one morning soldiers from Bangladeshi border force, the BDR, stormed their village, rounded up all the Rohingyas living there, and marched them towards the border.
En route, she said, the soldiers beat her husband severely and pushed her along, ignoring the one-week-old baby in her arms. When they reached the top of a hill bordering Burma, the soldiers simply gave them a shove to send them back to the country from which they had fled.
In the chaos, she was separated from her husband; she later received reports that he had been captured by the Nasaka, the Burmese border force operating in Arakan State. She and some other women hired a boat to take them back to Bangladesh. When they arrived, Haziqah realized that her baby had died along the way.
Similar stories of brutality at the hands of the Bangladesh Rifles, as the paramilitary border force is known, are common among new arrivals at the makeshift camp. Like Haziqah, many of the women have been separated from their husbands and must struggle to find food and look after their children by themselves.
Since tensions broke out in August between Bangladesh and Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) over the latter’s construction of a border fence, arrests and forced repatriation of Rohingya refugees has dramatically increased.
In Cox’s Bazar, a district in southern Bangladesh where many Rohingya live in both unofficial camps and in camps supported by the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, different opinions are circulating as to why arrests have increased, but one NGO worker stated the most prominent one.
“The construction of the border fence means that the BDR will no longer be able to push back the Rohingya without the SPDC knowing; instead, they will have to pass through the gates,” he explained.
“The Bangladeshi government is afraid. In a way it’s a race against time to send back as many Rohingya refugees as they can, before construction is completed,” he added.
In order to escape arrest, many have fled to the unofficial camp, which unlike the UNHCR camp next door, receives no food rations. The Bangladeshi government refuses to accept Rohingya who arrived in the country after 1991 as refugees and instead labels them illegal migrants, leaving them to fend for themselves.
As a result of the influx of Rohingya refugees from the “push back” areas, the little food available to the refugees must be shared among more mouths, creating problems in the camps.
Unrecognized by the Bangladeshi government, NGOs are unable to provide food for the refugees, leaving them to find work in the nearby area. However, recent arrests at checkpoints, to and from the workplace, have led to many being too afraid to leave the camp to find work.
Zawpe, a Rohingya leader in Kutupalong camp, told The Irrawaddy that more than 500 people were arrested last month and another 100 so far this month.
“Because of the arrests, conditions in the camp are very bad. People are too afraid to go outside to find food. The food crisis is alarming,” he explained, standing at the top of a hill overlooking the maze of mud huts that make up the camp.
“The government doesn’t let NGOs give us food and we are not allowed to work for food, so we are starving. It’s 1 pm and most the camp hasn’t eaten yet.
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