Rohingya refugees: A threat to Bangladesh?

Following some recent unprecedented violent incidents in the country, like bomb attacks on Shia Muslim community in Old Dhaka, continuous fatal attacks on free thinkers or bloggers, in which local and foreign Islamic radical groups are reportedly directly involved, time has come for the Bangladesh government to seriously think of the Rohingya refugee issue afresh and deal with it more meticulously.

Why look at the matter? One thing should be made clear at the outset, that the Rohingya crisis is surely a humanitarian catastrophe, but it is imperative that we focus on it from the aspect of Bangladesh’s security.

The first mass exodus of Rohingya refugees, standing around 250,000, into Bangladesh from Myanmar’s south-western province of Rakhine took place in the late 1970s due to repression by the then Myanmar’s military junta. Again, almost the same number of Rohingyas crossed into Bangladesh in the beginning of the 1990s. Apart from that, a trickling of small numbers of Rohingyas into Bangladesh takes place every now and then. Many have been repatriated, but still a big number of them are living in Bangladesh. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are, at present, more than 32,000 registered or documented Rohingya refugees living in two camps of Cox’s Bazar district, and around 200,000-500,000 undocumented refugees living in the adjoining areas including the CHT.

This huge number of Rohingya refugees is a matter of serious security concern because, for various Islamic extremist groups — both local and foreign — this area is fertile ground for recruiting members from the Rohingya youths. Taking advantage of poverty, the extremist groups recruit them by paying around Tk10,000 every month.

Recently, New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights expressed concern, saying that the Rohingyas in Bangladesh are vulnerable to traffickers and recruitment by extremist Islamic groups due to negligence of the UNHCR and Bangladeshi authorities.

The Rohingyas have some militant groups of their own: Rohingya Patriotic Front, Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front, Tehrek-e-Azadi Arakan, and Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO). Of these, the RSO is the most infamous.

Demands of these armed groups range from autonomy to a separate Islamic state. Various sources say the base camps of these armed groups are situated inside the bordering areas of Bangladesh, with local administrations feigning ignorance on the fact.

The Rohingya youths, recruited by foreign terrorist groups, are treated as cannon fodder in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, and elsewhere, in the name of Jihad. One of the instructing languages in al-Qaeda training camps is Bengali that the Rohingyas speak in.

Seeing the close nexus in between the Rohingya militants and al-Qaeda, some experts claim that the largest al-Qaeda cell in South-East Asia is said to be in Myanmar, surely hinting at the areas close to Bangladesh-Myanmar border.

The RSO maintains close ties with Indonesia’s most fearful terrorist outfit: Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which was responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people. Other than the JI, many radical Islamic groups in Indonesia have vowed to retaliate against Myanmar’s interests. In May 2013, Indonesian security forces foiled an attack on Myanmar’s embassy, which was found to be orchestrated by sympathisers of the Rohingyas. Mahabodhi Temple, a most revered holy site of the Buddhists in India, came under a series of bomb attacks on July 7, 2013. On October 2, 2014, a bomb blast took place in the Burdhman area of West Bengal that accidentally claimed two members of Bangladesh’s outfit, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). In connection with these incidents, the Indian security forces either arrested the RSO members or their sympathisers.

A Rohingya militant group along with eight other radical Islamic groups, including India’s North-east’s the Muslim Liberation Tigers of Assam and the Islamic Oikya Jote, a political party in Bangladesh, formed an umbrella organisation, named the Bangladesh Islamic Manch, back in 2002.

This organisation had ties with Osama bin Laden through the Harakat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami network. The main goal of this organisation is to set up an Islamic state in this region, stretching from Assam of India in the north, to Rakhaine province of Myanmar in the South-east, with Bangladesh in the middle.

Already in a situation of losing the capacity of taking in new settlements, the CHT bears the brunt of influx of Rohingya refugees. The Parbattya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJSS), a regional political party of the indigenous Jumma peoples that signed the 1997 CHT Accord with the Bangladesh government, ending over two decades long armed resistance, directly brings serious allegations that the local administrations in the CHT are not only settling the Muslim Rohingya refugees in the CHT, but also enlisting them in the voter list, and providing them with permanent residence certificates — in clear violation of the 1997 CHT Accord.

If what the PCJSS claims are found true, then surely the CHT problem is getting worse in the coming days, especially at a time when the indigenous Jumma peoples are in utter frustration seeing the accord not being implemented in full yet, even after 18 long years.

Furthermore, there are reports that the RSO and different Islamic radical groups are running training camps and drug trafficking operations within the CHT. Their funds mostly come from middle-east based charities like Rabeta Al-Alam Al-Islami and the Al Harmain Islami Foundation.

Indian Home Secretary Anil Goswami, in the Indo-Bangladesh home secretary level talks held in July 2013, raised concerns over the military training camps run inside the CHT by the RSO with the assistance of local and foreign terrorist groups, like Pakistan-based Lashker-e-Taiba and JMB.

As part of taking a precautionary security move following recent intrusion of the Rohingyas into its north-east region, and involvement in terrorist activities in India and elsewhere — the Indian Home Ministry is contemplating a census of around 5,000 Rohingyas living in India. There are also around 300,000 Rohingya refugees living in Pakistan, 600,000 in Saudi Arabia, and 20,000 in Thailand.Bangladesh is not yet a signatory of the UN Refugee Convention, 1951, nor its Protocol 1967. It does not have any institutional mechanism for Refugee Status Determination (RSD), or any law or formal policy to oversee the cases of refugees, and political asylum-seekers. The members of Rohingya refugees involved in terrorist activities are using these technical loopholes in their favour.

For being host of some hundreds of thousands of undocumented Rohingya refugees, and the one of having land border with Rakhaine state of Myanmar, Bangladesh should take some pragmatic steps to address the Rohingya refugee crisis more prudently, the failure of which will make the Bangladesh-Myanmar border become a new theatre of global jihad, and this will not only affect Bangladesh’s national security but also of the entire region.