‘We cannot choose our neighbour’: A glimpse of Bangladesh as the Rohingya crisis persists

When my grandfather worked as a livestock trader many years ago, he used to sail boatloads of cows some 180 miles between Ramree (Yanbye) Island in southern Rakhine State’s Kyaukphyu Township and Cox’s Bazar, now a border town in Bangladesh. Maritime trade has hummed along the Bay of Bengal coast for centuries, at least as far back as the Mrauk-U Kingdom, the Rakhine polity that once stretched from the Ayeyarwady delta to the mouth of the Ganges. Commerce between the countries now called Bangladesh and Myanmar never abated despite recurring tensions between them, which flared when they gained independence from the British Empire a year apart: Bangladesh as an eastern exclave province of Pakistan in 1947 and Myanmar as the independent country of Burma in 1948. Everything I used to hear about my grandfather’s business made it sound like a failure. He barely made a profit, according to the people who knew him. Still, he went back to Cox’s Bazar again and again, never losing his optimism. Although he passed away when I was too young to form a memory of him, his reputation in his native village as a homegrown “cowboy” and good-humoured raconteur and outlived him. And the stories about his travels made my community’s lasting ties to Bangladesh part of my personal experience. The word “Bangladesh” came up in conversations throughout my childhood and we knew many of the items we used in our daily lives—utensils, tin pots, clothes, and even the traditional longyi garments worn by Rakhine and Burmese men—were made there. Bangladesh felt like something of a next door neighbour. Growing up, I came to understand something else that linked the two neighbouring countries: their histories of dictatorial rule and drastic, destabilising social upheavals. My first chance to gain a first-hand impression of Bangladesh came in 2016, when a nonprofit organisation called Sarus, focused on improving relations between the countries, provided me an opportunity to visit. Although my motives for going to Bangladesh were very different from my grandfather’s, I couldn’t help but feel that I was following in his path, buoyed by the same spirit of adventure. A rise in Islamist extremism was roiling Bangladesh’s political landscape at the time. I worked for Caritas Bangladesh as an intern that year, submitting a report on gender policy to the government and conducting a case study on prostitution through individual interviews with sex workers, along with additional research on unemployment with support from the Asian University for Women in Chittagong. More recently, in August of this year, I made my second visit to Bangladesh. This time I came face to face with a very different issue—one that has attracted global attention and further complicated relations between Myanmar and Bangladesh: the growing crisis in the Rohingya refugee community. The interim government led by Dr. Muhammad Yunus had invited journalists to an international conference focused on the prospects for repatriating Rohingya refugees to their rightful home in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Although I went knowing the government and salient issues of the day had changed, the Dhaka I saw when I arrived was deeply familiar to me: the din from trishaws, tuk-tuks, cars, and buses and the teeming crowds were the same as I remembered from nearly a decade before. The fact that truly cast my visit in a new light, however, was that the Bangladeshi government was now hosting more than 1.3 million Rohingya people from my home state. They had sought refuge here after fleeing a brutal, military-led campaign of persecution that culminated in 2017, the year after my last trip to this country. A scene inside a camp for Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh (Photo: Su Chay / Myanmar Now) ‘We cannot choose our neighbour’ Stakeholders of every background attended the conference, including United Nations diplomats, members of the Rohingya diaspora, and Bangladeshi government officials, as well as the sector I had come with: members of the international and Myanmar media. I soon noticed that I was hearing one telling sentence repeated frequently by Bangladeshi officials and journalists, which never failed to elicit nods around the room: “We cannot choose our neighbour.” Their meaning was clear: They were alluding to the vital importance of making a neighbour a friend rather than a foe—the need to ease tensions between two geographically close countries that were nevertheless separated along religious, cultural, and historical fault lines, between the country Rohingya refugees had fled in terror and the country that had taken them in. What seemed to unite everyone there was agreement about that need—the shared responsibility that the Rohingya humanitarian crisis had presented us with. The journalists who received us at the Daily Star, Bangladesh’s leading English-language paper, candidly admitted that they knew little about us or our work outside of the Rohingya issue. They asked about Myanmar’s political landscape and ongoing civil war, clearly motivated by sincere interest in our perspective. Buoyed by the openness and candour of these initial discussions, with our shared interest in the humanitarian crisis on our doorsteps bringing us closer despite our differences, I was not prepared for a strikingly different encounter I experienced later. On the afternoon of August 27, we waited for at least an hour to meet with a senior official of the Bangladeshi government’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Committee—the agency tasked with monitoring conditions for refugees and granting permission to visit the camps. We had barely had a chance to take our seats in front of his desk before he asked: who among us were from Rakhine State? Not knowing what was coming, I gamely said that I was. Staring at me, he asked: How did I feel about the 700,000 Rohingya being expelled from my state by the military? “I feel as humanely as I can about their situation… Just like everyone else in the room here,” I answered, the best response I felt I could give without more time to think. The answer evidently had not satisfied him. He shot back: And how is that? “I feel badly for them.” Again, it was all I could think to say without tying myself up in my own words. The tone of his questions only became sharper: Had the Myanmar military committed genocide? What had I done during the 2017 clearance operation? Had I covered it? Had I known right from wrong? Caught off guard by this interrogation, I was at a loss in the moment: Could I answer as I honestly felt, that I could not see any good in blaming a journalist or ordinary, unarmed citizen in Rakhine State for actions the military had taken? Who, thinking logically, could think that was just? The Myanmar military’s persecution of ethnic minorities throughout the country—not to mention children, pregnant women, monks, the elderly, and indeed anyone they deem to be in their way—has a long and notorious history. Did my origin and home, which I had no part in choosing, make it appropriate to prosecute me as an accomplice to all of this? When I mustered the courage to speak up, saying it was unjust to single me out for being Rakhine, he ignored me. It was unsurprising when he denied my group permission to visit more refugee camps, some of which we had already seen on our trip. His pretext was that we did not have the right kind of visa. But he had known what kind of visa we had from the beginning. If it had been the real reason, he could have spared us the two-hour wait, or the spectacle of aggressively interrogating one of us just on the basis of origin. In any case, before he confirmed he was rejecting our request, he added for good measure that I had been “unable to answer his questions.” Notwithstanding this one episode of vindictive treatment, which was particularly disappointing in contrast to the hours spent in constructive discussion, the same mantra echoed in my head. We cannot choose our neighbour. My thoughts went back to the people I had met the day before in the camps. We had been denied permission to go back, but if anything stayed with me from my latest look into Bangladesh, it would be their desires, their hopes, and their voices. Mothers with their newborn infants wait to see a doctor at a clinic in Cox’s Bazar on August 26 (Photo: Su Chay / Myanmar Now) In the campsI had hoped my second visit to Bangladesh would be an opportunity to delve as deeply as possible into the stories of the Rohingya living in the country’s destitute refugee camps. On the sideline of the conference, which marked the eighth anniversary of the infamous massacre led by the Myanmar military, I spoke with many refugees in the Rakhine language. One thing they all shared was a desperate desire to go back to Arakan, their home. As we spoke to each other face to face, I could see in their eyes how much they wished to return. Then, on August 26, I made an all too brief visit to a camp in Cox’s Bazar—the world's largest—that made it clear why they were so desperate to return to their former lives. As soon as we entered the camp area, a noxious odor filled the air, rising from the sprawling, muddy ground surrounding us. Children ran about half naked and new mothers held sickly-looking infants at the clinic. Rows of stalls lined the streets with few people around able to afford their wares. Men in longyis sat and squatted by the roadside, looking as if they were yearning for something to do, or kept busy patching and fixing the deteriorating roofs on their makeshift shelters. On all sides, you could look straight into the eyes of living portraits of the crisis. One Rohingya man originally from Rathedaung in Rakhine State, who was waiting for his ration at the World Food Programme office, confirmed the Myanmar military was chiefly responsible for driving him and his family to Bangladesh, but added that some Rakhine people were also involved. “They said we are not from Rakhine,” he said. “But Bangladesh also said we’re not from here. So then where are we from?” Asked if he wanted to go back home like the others, he said yes, without a second’s hesitation. “All we’re waiting for is the day when we can go back home to Rakhine,” he said. “We want to go back home as soon as we can.” That man’s words and the camp residents’ eyes remain more firmly etched in my memory than my own bitter experience of being unfairly targeted for my ethnicity. They reminded me of the words I so often heard during my trip: We cannot choose our neighbours. To resolve the Rohingya crisis, the people of both Myanmar and Bangladesh will need to overcome their differences and work toward their shared goal of achieving peaceful co-existence. Both nations are now undergoing major political changes that could complicate these efforts. On the Myanmar side, ending military rule will be key to bringing peace to the country’s borders, as well as to its heartland. Bangladesh clearly wants to find common ground so that it can responsibly discharge its humanitarian duties to the Rohingya and help them fulfill their aspirations to return to their homeland without fear of further violence. But even there, there are some who are more inclined to division than to mutual understanding. Alienating or antagonising neighbours based on race, origin, language, or religion is not only something to avoid because it is wrong, but also because as a practical matter, we cannot choose our neighbours. Only by making a friend of someone we are inclined to see as a foe can we hope to overcome the problems that beset us both.

‘We cannot choose our neighbour’: A glimpse of Bangladesh as the Rohingya crisis persists

By turns inspiring, frustrating, and heartbreaking, my recent trip to Bangladesh underscored how international tension can thwart progress in addressing even the most urgent humanitarian needs

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