“I’m very afraid, because if the virus arrives to the camp, no one will be alive, as here many people are living in very small place.”
So said Hotiza, a Rohingya woman in her mid-80s who was one of 15 people recently interviewed by Amnesty International regarding Covid-19 and its potential implications for the packed refugee camps in Southern Bangladesh.
Since late 2017, in excess of 850,000 Rohingya have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh. In fact, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) puts the current number of refugees there at closer to a million so concerns about the coronavirus spreading into such refugee camps are wholly justified.
The UNHCR and several of its partners are presently working “around the clock” to build isolation centres in a pre-emptive bid to prepare for the worst, but it’s worth noting that at the time of posting, no Covid-19 cases have been reported in any of the camps.
In a video posted on Twitter, Steven Corliss, the UNHCR’s Bangladesh Country Representative stated: “So far, we seem to have been very lucky. There are no confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the Rohingya refugee settlements in Southern Bangladesh. We are in a race against time. We’re trying to get ready. What you see behind me (which he gestures towards during the clip) is an isolation and treatment centre which would provide immediate care to 150 to 200 persons. Similar centres are being constructed in different places in and around the Rohingya refugee settlements. They’ll serve the refugees but they’ll also serve the local community. This is very important. Virus does not respect status, it doesn’t ask whether you’re Rohingya or Bangladeshi so everything we’re doing, all of our response has to be for both communities.”
In a Financial Times (FT) report by Susannah Savage, it’s clear that aid workers in Southern Bangladesh are bracing themselves for a Covid-19 outbreak with potentially devastating consequences.
“Overcrowded, under resourced and lacking healthcare and sanitation, the camps in Cox’s Bazar are a ‘ticking time bomb’, warned Médecins Sans Frontières,” she writes. “Just 88 cases of coronavirus have been detected in Bangladesh but testing rates are low and many experts believe the actual number to be far higher.”
Savage adds: “When a Bangladeshi woman in Cox’s Bazar town tested positive on March 24, it sparked alarm. Bangladeshi authorities have put the country on lockdown and restricted refugees’ movements inside the camps. ‘Authorities are going around the camp and if they find people are not following curfew…they beat them,’ said Minara, a Rohingya refugee living in Jamtoli camp.”
During the last week of March, Amnesty International interviewed 15 older Rohingya men and women living in seven of the 34 refugee camps (that’s right, 34) near Cox’s Bazar in South Eastern Bangladesh in relation to Covid-19. Bearing in mind that UNHCR figures suggest there are at least 31,500 refugees aged 60 or older in these camps, the consequences of a coronavirus outbreak in such camps are legitimately worrying – if not terrifying.
“At the best of times, humanitarian organisations struggle or fail to meet the specific needs of older people in refugee and displacement camps,” said Amnesty’s Matt Wells. “Repeating this same mistake amid the COVID-19 pandemic puts older Rohingya women and men in imminent danger – with some of them not even receiving the most basic information about what is happening and how they can best stay safe.”
He added: “Donor countries and humanitarian organisations should urgently work together to remedy this lack of accessible information and implement a plan to ensure that older refugees are not left behind yet again in this time of elevated global risk.”
Worryingly, of the 15 Rohingya interviewed by Amnesty, just one reported of someone coming to their shelter to provide them with some Covid-19 related information. According to Amnesty: “A few others received news through family members about the disease and preventative measures like frequent hand-washing. Most had heard primarily from religious leaders and neighbours, with little detail other than the virus was very dangerous and they needed to ‘live clean’. As a result, fear is rampant.”
The prospect of enforcing social distancing in any camps where, as the FT notes, there are up to 70,000 people living per square kilometre is akin to “telling people to get under their tables when there’s an imminent nuclear war” according to one aid worker.
Sawyedullah, a 26-year-old Rohingya youth leader told Susannah Savage: “All over the world, each country is focusing on their own people, but we Rohingya are stateless. Who will care for us?”
Amnesty’s Matt Wells said: “Older displaced people face a devastating combination: they are the group most at-risk of Covid-19, and they are also the group least included in humanitarian response. Their invisibility must end now. Governments, donors, and humanitarian organisations must put older people at the centre of their planning and response, to minimise the deadly consequences of this global pandemic.”
Reading about what may be facing the Rohingya in the context of people here in Ireland reportedly driving to holiday homes in Counties Wexford, Clare and Waterford, the selfishness of some of my fellow citizens during this pandemic is hard to fathom.
So please keep Washing Your Hands. And for God’s sake, Stay At Home.
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