A Rohingya man tested positive for coronavirus inside the overcrowded refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where nearly 1 million Rohingya live. Jewish World Watch and our on-the-ground partners have been bracing and attempting to prepare for a potentially nightmarish outbreak. Conditions in the vast, fetid camps are conducive to the rapid and rampant spread of this merciless disease. With a population density eight times that of Wuhan City in China, along with poor sanitation and lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), the virus could spread like wildfire, causing thousands upon thousands to die.
Jewish World Watch has already moved quickly and urgently to mobilize resources to enable our partners in the camps to bolster the Rohingya against this exact scenario. These survivors of the world’s most recent genocide must be spared another scourge that could decimate a large swath of their population.
Our partner on the ground tells us that the Bangladeshi authorities quickly moved to lock down Lambasia, Block-F, the area in one of the 34 camps in the Rohingya settlement where the virus was detected. Around 5,000 people have been ordered to remain inside the approximately 1,275 makeshift shelters that make up this camp block. Security personnel is closely monitoring the area.
“Everything is still under control but the Rohingya, host community, and government are very tense and worried as the camps are so densely populated,” reports our local partner. “Hopefully, the work we have been doing to inform the Rohingya throughout the camps about the risks of COVID-19 and how to prevent infection will minimize the potential catastrophe.”
The 1 million Rohingya inside the Cox’s Bazar camps have been struggling with an Internet and mobile phone shut down for months. With extremely restricted telecommunications access, the Rohingya have been cut off from life-saving information on how to protect themselves against COVID-19. In response to the dangerous information gap, our partner on the ground is using radio broadcasts to share information with the Rohingya on a massive scale. They have mounted huge speakers on rickshaws and deployed them to all corners of the camps. These rickshaws have been blaring information in the Rohingya language around-the-clock to ensure that as many Rohingya as possible are informed of contextually appropriate methods to avoid contagion. Now that the virus has entered the camps, this information campaign will be even more essential to keep refugees apprised of developments related to containment efforts, control rumors, and to tell the refugees where and how to access vital services.
The rickshaws have helped contain hysteria, our partner reports. “When they hear information from a trusted organization in their own language, it makes them feel more safe.” This is particularly true since the government of Bangladesh instituted a campwide lockdown, forcing many humanitarian organizations to pull staff and programming out of the camps.
A second JWW partner has been delivering emergency food packs to especially vulnerable Rohingya, including those who subjected to physical or sexual harm during the clearance operations that caused nearly 800,000 Rohingya to flee Myanmar in August 2017.
Our partner told JWW, “We know that the distributions have been completed successfully, but it’s so hard to even communicate with staff on the ground because of the telecommunications blackout and the fact that so many organizations have pulled out. I’m afraid for the Rohingya, but they are so much better off thanks to this JWW project than they would have been in the face of a COVID outbreak. It feels like much of the world has abandoned them, especially with so many NGOs stopping their work inside the camps. Thanks to JWW we can continue to support them in their survival during this scary time.
“We need more resources to enable survivor families to stay indoors and adopt social distancing as much as possible in this challenging environment. The more distributions of emergency food supplies and masks we can do, the more we will enable the Rohingya to actually take the recommended precautions to save themselves.”
The Rohingya continue to be squeezed on all sides during the pandemic. In addition to the telecommunications blackout and the camp lockdown, the Bangladeshi government has erected a barbed-wire fence around the 34-camp settlement. This makes it exceedingly difficult to bring vital services into the camps or get infected Rohingya safely out of the camps if they need intensive care. Only two isolation areas have been established for the entire camp system, which serves over 1 million people, and there are no intensive care facilities anywhere inside the camps.
The Bangladeshi government has also exiled hundreds of Rohingya to Bhasan Char – a silt island in the Bay of Bengal. Bangladesh intended to relocate over a hundred thousand Rohingya refugees to live in the concrete, prison-like structures it has constructed on this remote island, which is only reachable by a three-hour boat ride, constantly pummeled by storms and at risk of sinking into the sea. Bangladesh abandoned those plans after significant international push-back, including advocacy efforts by Jewish World Watch and the Jewish Rohingya Justice Network, of which we are an important part.
After a boatload of about 280 Rohingya refugees trying to escape the threat of COVID-19 was rescued from the Bay of Bengal last week, the Bangladesh navy relocated them to Bhasan Char under the pretext of quarantining them from the main camp population. Jewish World Watch and other human rights groups fear for the safety of these refugees stranded on Bhasan Char without adequate access to healthcare or other vital services. Moreover, the use of Bhasan Char for quarantine purposes may create a dangerous precedent for larger-scale relocation to this precarious, “de facto detention island” that has been widely criticized by the international community.
The Rohingya still trapped inside Myanmar are subject to ongoing war crimes, with the Myanmar government reportedly using extended powers granted to battle COVID-19 as a cover for perpetrating even more atrocities. In Malaysia, the Rohingya have become scapegoats for mounting fears of COVID-19. Hate speech, discriminatory animus, and threats of violence have also spiked among Malaysians, who have been calling for the Rohingya’s return to Myanmar under the false pretense that they are responsible for the spread of coronavirus.
It is unconscionable that these survivors of genocide, in addition to bracing for the now very real threat of COVID infection, should be subjected to further rights effacing policies, atrocities, and hate-fueled threats to their safety. We cannot stand idly by in the face of this injustice and must continue supporting our Rohingya brothers and sisters now more than ever. As our partners have made clear, our support for their information dissemination and emergency distribution efforts inside the camps is now more critical than ever.