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Asia’s ‘forgotten’ refugee crisis
Bangladesh, struggling with a million Rohingya refugees, says it won’t accept any more. Compassion fatigue is setting in elsewhere in the region.
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Earlier narratives of the Rohingya being victims have been replaced by hostility as they are seen as a source of crime and competition for jobs.
PHOTO: AFP
Syed Munir Khasru
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While the world’s attention is currently gripped by the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, a “forgotten” humanitarian crisis continues to unfold and deepen in Asia: that of the Rohingya, about a million of whom reside in densely packed camps in Bangladesh, grappling with appalling conditions and scant access to basic resources.
For decades, the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority group in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, have suffered from discrimination. In 2017, a brutal military crackdown led to the mass exodus of over 700,000 of them to neighbouring Bangladesh.
