Rohingyas Nowhere to live

Md Yasin was chopped into pieces as he tried to stop some Buddhist extremists from slaughtering his only son in Akyab (Sittwe) while they were living in Arakan state of Myanmar.
Layla, Yasin’s wife, had no reason to stay in their homeland and so she along with her pregnant daughter and son-in-law crossed the border into Bangladesh towards the end of 2012.
The family took shelter at a place named Tal, which in English means ‘stack.’ The area was given the name as thousands of unregistered poor refugees are stacked together in one small place.
Now about 30,000 unregistered Rohingyas are living without any certainty of a meal near the Rohingya camp at Ukhiya in Cox’s Bazaar, former union council member Bakhtiar Ahmad told New Age.
The unregistered migrated Rohingyas are not recognised as refugees by the Bangladesh government but accommodated in seven sections of Tal each of which contains some 1,050 families, he said.
A month after taking shelter in Tal, Layla’s son-in-law Md Shafiq drifted away and went to Teknaf leaving behind his four-month pregnant wife, and making a new life there by marrying a Bangladeshi woman, and becoming a rickshaw-van puller.
Still in Tal, Layla’s daughter gave birth to a baby boy three months ago, she said as she was limping along the road carrying a bundle of fire wood.
When asked what happened to her leg, she said that a forest patrol team had chased her while collecting firewood from Madhuchhara hill forest, one of the protected areas of the country, and that she sustained the injury in the right knee while she was trying to run away.
Shahnaj Begum and a few other people, wearing clothes that could be more accurately described as rags covering their thin bodies, described their daily struggle for survival.
They said that they were forced to beg door-to-door in a wide area around Tal such as Chunapara, Inani, Rajapalang, Kutupalang.
The next most reliable source of income for the unregistered Rohingyas is wood collection from hill forests, Shahnaj said.
Senwara Begum with her husband Ramzan Ali migrated from Myanmar and took shelter near the Rohingya camp at Rajapalang in Ukhya upazila eight years back.
‘Last year, my husband died in the Bay of Bengal as he was trying to go to Malaysia in a trawler,’ said Senwara, who also married a Bengali man later.
Those who want to escape with the hope for a better life try to do so from Rajapalang in Ukhya, they said. There they find people who will make illegal arrangements to traffic the unregistered Rohingyas at a cost of Tk 6,000 to take refuge in India, Tk 12,000 to go in Malaysia and Tk 4,00,000 to in Arabia.
Bakhtiar, who is locally known as ‘prime patron’ of Rohingyas, said that the unregistered Rohingyas were not eligible for any support for their livelihood from international and local organisations.
‘Only Medicins sans Frontieres based in Holland provides some health-related supports for the Rohingyas,’ he said.
A number of the more prosperous people from the local area said that they sympathised with the helpless unregistered Rohingyas as they were Muslims and provided them some support but acknowledged that these supports hardly resulted in them being able to live a decent human life.
Local syndicates involved helpless and desperate unregistered Rohingyas in poaching in the Inani Protected Forest, theft and prostitution in Cox’s Bazar, they said.
Shahjahan, who migrated many years ago, now runs the biggest ‘business’ of firewood collection from Inani protected areas, local people told New Age.
They said that Shahjahan gives tokens to 200 to 250 unregistered Rohingyas a day for collecting firewood from the protected areas and in exchange he is given Tk 30 a day for each adult and Tk 20 for each child.