Coronavirus in Cox's Bazaar refugee camps

If there's one thing we've learned over the past few weeks, it's that the coronavirus doesn't affect everyone equally. Since 9 April, more than 850,000 Rohingya refugees have been living in complete isolation imposed in order to reduce the impact of the disease in the overcrowded refugee camps. In this context, at least 24 Rohingya volunteers are working alongside UN women to raise awareness of the importance of protecting themselves from the coronavirus. 

UNHCR has said in an official statement that, according to the latest data, there are currently about 859,161 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, most of them women and girls. The coronavirus has killed more than 100 people in the country and another 3,000 are struggling to overcome a disease, which has killed more than 170,000 people worldwide. "To prevent this disease, we need to raise awareness about personal cleanliness, hand washing and the dos and don'ts when you are sick," said Mobina Khatun, a UN Women volunteer. 

Mobina Khatun has expressed her concern about the impact this disease may have on female-headed households. "If the mother is affected, then all her children are vulnerable," she has warned. And all of this in a context where they not only have to deal with the coronavirus, but they also have to deal with other problems such as food insecurity or difficulties in accessing medical care. "We' re afraid because we don't have anything. Because we live in an overpopulated area, if there is limited access to medical treatment and the virus comes here, we will all die. Therefore, we need enough hygiene materials such as soap and masks, along with health personnel such as doctors or nurses," she told UNHCR. 

In this context, the increasing exposure of women to different types of violence must also be considered. According to UNHCR, global estimates show that more than 70% of women suffer from gender-based violence in crisis settings. In view of this situation, several volunteers have decided to collaborate with UN Women to counteract "the gender risks and barriers" which affect women and girls in Cox's Bazaar. "The pandemic has made life more difficult in the camps. Food prices have increased and there are shortages due to transport and movement restrictions," explains Nurussafa, another UN Women volunteer.
 

Meanwhile, several international organizations have reported that the basic information about the symptoms of this disease and measures to prevent its spread is "not reaching" a large part of the Rohingya refugees living in these camps. They have also stressed the importance of controlling the elderly, since they are the most affected by this virus worldwide. 

Amnesty International's Deputy Director of Crisis Response for Thematic Issues, Matt Wells, has said in recent months that "humanitarian organizations are struggling or failing to meet the specific needs of older people in refugee and IDP camps.  The repetition of this same mistake in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic puts women and older people at imminent risk, and some of them don't even receive the most basic information about what is happening and how best to stay safe".

In June 2019, Amnesty International published a report on the impact of the so-called Rohingya genocide and the consequences for older people of living as displaced people. With the arrival of the coronavirus, the mistakes made more than a year ago have been exposed again. "Before large gatherings were banned and preventive measures such as social distancing were ordered, some briefings were held in the camps, but many older people were not informed," Amnesty International has warned. "I am very afraid, because if the virus comes to the camp, no one will be alive, as there are many people living in a very small place here," Hotiza, a woman aged around 85, told Amnesty International. 

"Displaced older people face a devastating combination: they are the group most at risk from COVID-19, and are also the group least included in the humanitarian response. Their invisibility must end now. Governments, donors and humanitarian organizations must put older people at the center of their planning and response, to minimize the deadly consequences of this global pandemic," warned Matt Wells. 
 

"That of madness and that of reason are two bordering countries, with borders so imperceptible that you can never know for sure if you are in the territory of one or the other," warned the poet Arturo Graf at one point or another, not knowing that this phrase could well describe the future of the Rohingya. The history of this forgotten and persecuted ethnic group has taken place in recent years in the Myanmar state of Rakhine or Rajine (known by the Rohingya as Arakan).  This place - which occupies a coastal strip more than 500 kilometers long and stretches along the Bay of Bengal - has witnessed some of the cruelest and bloodiest human rights violations in history.  

However, the Rohingya have been forced to leave their land and live in the refugee camps set up in the town of Cox's Bazaar on the west coast of Bangladesh. The history of the Rohingya changed completely in 2017, although persecution of the Rohingya had existed since colonial times and even before. Journalist and writer Alberto Masegosa, explains in his book Rohinya: The Drama of the Unnamed and the Legend of Aung San Suu Kyi, that colonialism was the spark that lit the flame of the Rohingya genocide. "During the second half of the 20th century; the British began to move population groups from the Indian subcontinent to Myanmar", some of them of Islamic faith, in a predominantly Buddhist country.  

The concept of persecution of this ethnic group took on another level after the so-called Rohinya Salvation Army of Arakan attacked at least 30 military posts in the summer of 2017. The response was - to quote the author mentioned above - "a collective punishment against the Rohingya people". "The atrocities perpetrated in the weeks following the attack of August 25, 2017 shared a strategy with Nazi Germany," the writer laments.  This attack took the lives of thousands and thousands of people and forced as many others to become refugees.  Three years later, the coronavirus has once again endangered an ethnic group that, since its appearance, has been punished and persecuted, for the simple fact of having a religious creed different from the established one, and condemned, for this reason, to live in exile and far from the land in which they were born.