The flow of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh shows no sign of abating

By THE DATA TEAM

NOT since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 have more people crossed an international border in a shorter span of time than currently from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Since August 25th, when attacks on police and army posts by Rohingya insurgents in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine triggered an army-led pogrom, nearly 600,000 Muslim Rohingyas have fled the Buddhist-majority state, which is also Myanmar’s poorest.

Bangladesh is said now to host at least 800,000 stateless Rohingyas on a 100km-long strip of land in the most underdeveloped part of the country (one UN estimate puts the figure at around 1m). Seven weeks into the exodus, the number of people crossing by land, or the river that divides Bangladesh and Myanmar, is still rising. There has in fact been a surge in new arrivals in recent days (see chart). The conditions in the rapidly growing camps are squalid; the humanitarian response is slow and inadequate. More than 200,000 refugees are children.

The Bangladesh army plans to build a “super camp” for more than 800,000 Rohingya refugees. One of the largest in the world, the plan carries the risk of a spread of disease as well as becoming a breeding ground for non-state armed groups. The Bangladesh government refers to the refugees as “undocumented Myanmar nationals”, a label designed to reduce its obligations under international law and the UN’s role.

This is the third big exodus of Rohingyas after hundreds of thousands fled in 1978 and 1991-92 (most of them were repatriated in the years that followed). As the refugee crisis mounts, talk in the capitals Dhaka and Nay Pyi Taw has already turned to repatriation even as tens of thousands of Rohingyas continue to flee their burning villages. Bangladesh knows that it is probably dealing with a permanent refugee crisis. Myanmar’s army, which like most Burmese consider the Rohingyas to be Bengali immigrants with no valid claim to a presence in Rakhine, has no inclination to take them back. And how many would want to go back remains unclear.

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