Two Years After Myanmar Coup : Let’s not Forget Rohingya Refugees Adrift at Sea : Daily Current Affairs

Date : 11/02/2023

Relevance: GS-2: India and its neighborhood - relations.

Key Phrases: Rakhine State, United Nations High Commissioner, UNHCR , ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), xenophobia, nationalism, Foreigners Act, 1946 .

Context:

February 1, 2023, marked two years since the military in Myanmar attempted to stage a coup.

Key Highlights:

The country has seen intense civil strife, widespread violence against civilians and an organised wave of resistance against the junta.
One of the worst-hit victims of their brutality was the Rohingya Muslim community, residing in the north of the Rakhine State in western Myanmar.
Some 8,00,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar and took refuge in the neighbouring country, Bangladesh.
In 2018, a report published by a UN fact-finding team concluded that the military campaigns had “genocidal intent”.

Life In The Refugee Camps

Conditions in the camps, which currently host about a million refugees, have deteriorated.
From rising poverty due to a lack of employment opportunities, to the constant threat of violence by criminal gangs and armed groups, the Rohingya continue to face multi-faceted threats in these camps.
Rising complaints by the host population of supposed resource degradation and social instability have driven the Sheikh Hasina government to ship off some 30,000 of the refugees to Bhashan Char, a remote, offshore island formed by silt deposition.
That the camps in Bangladesh are turning into hostile territory for the Rohingya, much like their enclosed villages and IDP camps in Myanmar, is shown by a steady uptick in refugee crossings through the Andaman Sea.
In 2022, hundreds of them took to the sea from Bangladesh and Myanmar on boats arranged by smugglers in search of a better life in Southeast Asia.
However, many of them found themselves in the maws of death in the middle of the high seas when their rickety vessels gave up halfway through.

Response From the World

Despite the UNHCR, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), and several Rohingya activists publicly releasing detailed information about the distressed, non-seaworthy vessels and issuing categorical calls for their rescue, no country or national maritime force in the Bay of Bengal littoral region has made any attempt to proactively look for or rescue the refugees.
The only exception was the Sri Lankan Navy, which rescued some 105 Rohingya from the country’s northern shores on December 18, 2022.
After the 2015 crossings when hundreds perished at sea, countries part of the “Bali Process”, a 49-member grouping formed in 2002, met in the Indonesian province and signed the 2016 Bali Declaration to collectively address the crisis and take the classic “never again” pledge.
Two years later, they signed another declaration and took another pledge. But, merely six years on, we are witnessing a dramatic return of these catastrophic sea crossings.

Is this a Crisis of Institutions?

It is easy to blame institutions, but they do not fail by themselves. They are made to fail by the same people who create them. The Bay of Bengal region today is plagued, first and foremost, by a crisis of empathy.
No government in the region wants to go out of its way to protect the Rohingya, let alone allow them to disembark in their territory.
At the outset, this is because most of these countries are not state parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Rising xenophobia, nationalism, and sectarianism, manifested in hate speech, militarised border regimes, and coordinated disinformation campaigns on social media, continue to fuel institutional apathy in several parts of the region.
This is a crisis that institutions, by themselves, cannot fix.
It demands a wholesale change of popular attitudes and political narratives, backed by a conscientious recognition by all governments in the region that refugees need affirmative protection. This is not easy.
Most nations don’t want to talk about the stateless community in bilateral or multilateral discussions, lest other “more important” political, economic or security agendas fall apart.
For this reason, a frank discussion about protecting Rohingya refugees at sea within the Bali Process, BIMSTEC, ASEAN or SAARC remains a pipe dream.

India’s attitude towards handling Refugees

India has welcomed refugees in the past and nearly 300,000 people here are categorized as refugees at present.
But India is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention or the 1967 Protocol. Nor does India have a refugee policy or a refugee law of its own.
This has allowed India to keep its options open on the question of refugees. The government can declare any set of refugees as illegal immigrants - as has happened with Rohingya despite the UNHCR verification - and decide to deal with them as trespassers under the Foreigners Act or the Indian Passport Act.
The Foreigners Act, 1946 in India has procedures to deport illegal immigrants.
Myanmar shares a 1,600-km border with the four North-eastern states of Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.
The Center had asked these states to “take appropriate action as per law” and “maintain a strict vigil at the border” to prevent a Rohingya influx.
The state governments were told that they did not have the authority to declare anyone as a “refugee” since India is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention of 1951.
This lack of generosity and compassion is a blemish on India’s record of treating communities under siege in its neighborhood – Tibetans, people from erstwhile East Pakistan and Sri Lankan Tamil.

Conclusion:

No country in the Bay of Bengal would likely be keen on receiving large groups of Rohingya refugees without a guarantee of swift repatriation.
While this takes us back to square one, it is worth a try. Some countries in the region might, in fact, be happy to outsource refugee SAR operations to NGOs. Since this is a humanitarian crisis, all alternatives must be given a shot.

Source: The Indian Express

Mains Question:

Q. Discuss India’s stance on refugees. Does Rohingya crisis show the failure of various international Institutions like UNHRC. (250 Words).