Whoever takes office in Bangladesh after the elections next month must prioritise lifting longstanding and deeply embedded restrictions on refugees.
By John Quinley in The New Humanitarian
Bangladesh’s Bhasan Char project, a man-made floating refugee camp with the stylings of a penal colony in the Bay of Bengal, was destined, from the outset, to fail Rohingya refugees. Championed by the despotic former Sheikh Hasina government, the isolated island was never designed to protect Rohingya, only to isolate, contain, and confine them.
In the project’s early days, I spoke with a UN official and whistleblower, speaking on condition of anonymity, who warned: “I don’t want this island to turn into a concentration camp.” That warning went unheeded.
Not long after, in October 2021, rather than taking a principled stance by pushing back and fighting for alternatives for refugees, the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Bangladesh government to deliver services on Bhasan Char, effectively legitimising a system of confinement instead of challenging it.
According to the UN whistleblower, UNHCR should have insisted on freedom of movement, before signing any agreement. “It is baffling to me that the UN didn’t push for more… We had so much leverage.”
UNHCR’s decision was a political calculation, prioritising continued access over principled opposition, at the cost of refugee rights and freedoms. In the end, the MoU signed by UNHCR failed to guarantee Rohingya refugees’ right to freedom of movement. Instead, it explicitly codified restrictions on movement, permitting Rohingya to leave the island only under conditions agreed upon by the government and UNHCR.
My colleagues and I actively engaged UNHCR at the time, urging the agency to amend the MoU.The agreement was kept from public view and only revealed after a Bangladeshi journalist leaked the document on social media. We translated the MoU into Rohingya-language audio and shared it as widely as possible. The people who most needed to understand its contents, the refugees themselves, had otherwise been kept in the dark, and to my knowledge there were no meaningful or widespread consultations with Rohingya refugees about the MoU.
The accounts in the report by Rohingya refugees on Bhasan Char offer a stark reminder of how policies debated by bureaucrats in non-descript conference rooms translate into real-world tragedies.
What followed was entirely predictable and should have been mitigated. Fortify Rights’ new report, “Like Prisoners”, documents how, over the course of five years, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar have been subjected to mass arbitrary detention and systematic “warehousing” on Bhasan Char. A 38-year-old Rohingya man and genocide survivor from Myanmar on Bhasan Char said, “Currently, we feel as though we are confined here, like prisoners.”
The accounts in the report by Rohingya refugees on Bhasan Char offer a stark reminder of how policies debated by bureaucrats in non-descript conference rooms translate into real-world tragedies.
After years of rejecting criticism directed toward Bhasan Char, members of the interim government have now advocated closing the island. In a recent interview with Fortify Rights, Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, said: “The government is not interested in continuing the Bhasan Char project.”
A white elephant of autocracy
Bhasan Char has always been a failed project. It should serve as a lesson for both the UN and governments, illustrating the dangers of trying to “manage” refugees rather than recognising them as individual rights-holders, entitled to dignity, autonomy, and liberty.
It clearly shows that humanitarian models built on containment inevitably inflict suffering, no matter how benevolent their stated aims. It also shows the folly of the UN entertaining the white elephant pet projects of autocratic governments.
Having worked in Bangladesh since 2017, I have seen firsthand how the UN system is in urgent need of a fundamental overhaul. The UN should finally prioritise human rights protections in line with its own “Human Rights Up Front” initiative. That initiative, says it “encourages staff to take a principled stance and to act with moral courage to prevent serious and large-scale violations”.
At every level, the UN must ensure a principled stance and adopt a genuinely rights-based approach. In Bangladesh, this means one that actively monitors and reports on abuses and makes clear that humanitarian access cannot be conditioned on silence or complicity, as was too often the case under the Hasina regime.
Finally, whoever takes office in Bangladesh after the elections next month must prioritise lifting longstanding and deeply embedded restrictions on refugees.
The next government should make good on the current administration’s promise and permanently close Bhasan Char, guaranteeing all Rohingya refugees their rights to freedom of movement, liberty, and access to education and livelihoods by dismantling restrictive policies nationwide. Anything less would repeat the failures that turned Bhasan Char into a prison island in the first place.
This article was originally published in The New Humanitarian.