Rohingya refugees walk along a road at the Kutupalang refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on June 26.Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters
Jason Nickerson is the humanitarian representative to Canada for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
“It would be an honour if a bomb killed all of us together, so we don’t have to suffer any more. Dying together is better than this suffering.”
These were the heartbreaking words a Rohingya man shared with my MSF colleagues in Myanmar a couple months ago, after attacks against his community in Buthidaung in Rakhine State. Lately, the civil conflict being fought across Myanmar has escalated in brutality, especially in Rakhine. There, members of the long-persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority have been targeted amid more fighting within the state between the Myanmar military and the separatist Arakan Army.
Canadians might find some of these details familiar. On Aug. 25, 2017, Canada and the world first learned that armed forces in Rakhine had launched large-scale attacks on Rohingya villages, burning homes to the ground and violently killing more than 9,000 people in less than a month. Within a matter of weeks, close to 700,000 Rohingya had fled for their lives from Myanmar and into Bangladesh.
These attacks on a single minority population prompted widespread global condemnation at the time and a huge international humanitarian response, and Canada took a prominent leadership role in those efforts. Arguably, it is one of the clearest examples of a co-ordinated Canadian diplomatic effort to find meaningful solutions to a major global crisis in recent memory. In 2017, Canada sent immediate assistance to help scale up the humanitarian support for traumatized Rohingya refugees arriving in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Soon after, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Bob Rae as a special envoy to assess the emergency and make recommendations for Canada’s response.
Mr. Rae’s subsequent report chronicled some of the appalling suffering in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. It also called on Canada to meaningfully intervene – not only by providing aid, but by using its many legal, diplomatic and political tools to help address the full scope of this crisis. Soon after, in May, 2018, Canada’s government launched a formal three-year strategy to respond to the Rohingya and Myanmar crises. That would remain a Canadian priority for the next six years, with Canada renewing its strategy for a second phase in 2021.
That second phase, however, expired this past March, and was not renewed in the government’s most recent federal budget. The level of diplomatic effort and the priority this escalating crisis will receive going forward is now unclear. But the humanitarian crisis facing Rohingya people has intensified once more.
As a front-line responder to the immense humanitarian medical needs in both Myanmar and Bangladesh, this apparent change in Canadian policy is deeply disappointing. The situation for the Rohingya and other civilian groups has become dramatically worse in recent months, and the crisis is arguably expanding as people flee to countries such as Malaysia. In Bangladesh alone – where today close to a million Rohingya remain trapped in dangerous and overcrowded camps – MSF medical teams are witnessing sharply increasing health needs related to violence, confinement and the collapse of basic humanitarian services. I saw these needs myself, when I visited our clinics in Malaysia and the camps in Cox’s Bazar earlier this year. And in Cox’s Bazar, which hosts the world’s largest refugee camp, nearly a million Rohingya live in abhorrent conditions of overcrowding, frequent disease outbreaks (including a protracted outbreak of scabies), an almost 20-per-cent prevalence of hepatitis C among the adult population and rising violence inside the camp.
Meanwhile, the situation for the roughly 600,000 Rohingya estimated to remain in Myanmar has once again taken a turn for the worse amid renewed fighting in Rakhine State. Emergency response organizations, including MSF, have been blocked from carrying out humanitarian activities and from accessing people in need. MSF was forced to suspend our operations in Northern Rakhine State on June 27. We are seeing yet another deterioration in a crisis that exploded onto the world’s consciousness in 2017 – except now, the world’s attention is fading.
For Canada, that marks a profound shift. When Mr. Rae first shared his report on the Rohingya crisis, he described it as a clear humanitarian imperative for Canada: “We can’t assume any more that some other country is going to take the lead and ride this thing through and get it done,” he said. “We have to stay engaged.” Seven years on, that engagement appears to be waning, even as the situation for the Rohingya has become grimmer than ever.
Canada cannot leave the Rohingya community, and organizations such as ours, in a state of uncertainty. It should heed Mr. Rae’s original advice and remain engaged in this increasingly neglected humanitarian crisis, by renewing its Rohingya and Myanmar Strategy and continuing to honour the commitments it made seven years ago.