Ennui over the Rohingya crisis is a clear and present danger. Bangladesh, an inadvertent -- even forced -- host to most of the million-plus Rohingya displaced from Myanmar's Rakhine province by genocidal intent since 2017, knows it well. So do its neighbours and its two largest trading and strategic partners, China and India. But they barely raise a murmur over the Rohingya issue.
There's of course a well-known but rarely discussed reason for this: Myanmar.
More precisely, their geopolitical and geo-economic interests in Myanmar, which the two delicately balance with their interests in Bangladesh. Among other factors, this has ensured that Bangladesh's Rohingya lament largely remains Bangladesh's own. The crisis has overwhelmingly been outsourced to Bangladesh to manage and contain.
But with growing socio-economic pressure in several refugee camps in the Cox's Bazar-Teknaf area, growing instances of trafficking in people and narcotics, incidence of gang violence in pressure-cooker camp environments, and the tension with host communities who despair of ever reclaiming their commons -- which mirror Rohingya despair over ever returning home to Rakhine -- the status quo has become unstable and untenable.
The matter has become more urgent after the vast earthquake-induced tragedy in Turkey and Syria. The United Nations-led calls for more than a billion dollars in urgent aid to mitigate that crisis has drawn the world's attention. A range of desperate conflicts and starvation zones in northern and central Africa, and the massive overhang of the Russia-Ukraine war that has just marked a year of death, destitution and financial drain, will fill the global agenda in 2023 and beyond.
In this backdrop, when news arrived last week that the World Food Program (WFP) planned to reduce the value of its food assistance to Rohingya refugees from $12 per person to $10 per person every month, beginning this March, it was another blow. WFP urged immediate fund-raising of $125 million with an or-else-malnutrition-and-ill-health threat among a population in which such problems are already rampant. What remained unsaid was the incendiary effect that less food could have on the already ration-fed refugees, besides the effects of severely stretched healthcare, education for children, and near-zero employment opportunities.
Bangladesh has observed this crisis more acutely in the past year. Official policy is now firmly predicated on repatriating Rohingya refugees. Nearly every high-level visit by foreign dignitaries to Dhaka, including those by Indian and Chinese officials, has seen this articulated by the prime minister, or her office, and every significant official in the foreign ministry. In turn, senior visiting Indian and Chinese officials have made polite noises, but little else.
China-Myanmar relations
This isn't surprising. China's millennial scope in Myanmar has massively increased. Chinese business interests, both government and private, range from extracting minerals to manufacturing garments. Since 2012, China's exports to Myanmar haven't dropped below $7 billion a year; since 2018 it hasn't dropped below $10bn a year; it topped $12bn in 2019 and 2020 -- not much less than China's exports to Bangladesh at the time. China exports to Myanmar everything from plant and machinery and broadcasting equipment to iron and steel, fabric and agricultural produce.
Two pipelines across Myanmar contribute to China's energy security. The Myanmar-China crude oil pipeline runs 771km from Madé Island off Kyaukpyu in Rakhine to Ruili in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, in the process traversing the heart of Rakhine State, the Magway Region, Mandalay Region, and Shan State. A 300,000-ton crude oil terminal has been built on Madé Island, with an annual capacity of storing and moving 22 million tonnes of oil (here I quote state-run China National Petroleum Corp. or CNPC which runs the pipeline as a joint venture with the state-run Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise or MOGE). This helps China to transship oil from West Asia and elsewhere and reduce dependence on the Strait of Malacca.
The second pipeline, the 793km long Myanmar-China Gas Pipeline starts at Ramree Island on the western coast of Myanmar, also in Rakhine just to the west of Madé and, running mostly parallel to the oil pipeline, also ends at Ruili in China's Yunnan Province. This pipeline delivers gas extracted from nearby offshore fields. The fields and the pipeline was launched with an interesting mix of investors, from CNPC and MOGE -- which also ensured offtake for Myanmar's own gas needs -- to Posco-Daewoo and KOGAS of South Korea, and Indian energy majors GAIL Ltd and the overseas exploration arm of ONGC Ltd!
Myanmar's government comes in handy to protect Chinese interests ranging from the pipelines to, say, controversial copper mines in Letpadaung in Myanmar's northwestern Sagaing Division to garment businesses in Yangon. In April 2021, protesters attacked and burnt more than 30 factories with Chinese investment as an apparent reaction to China's attempts to block sanctions against Myanmar after the coup. Add to this China's political interest along its 2,000km-plus border with Myanmar -- which begins in the north at a tri-junction with India -- and across which lie restive and autonomy-minded people like the Kachin, Wa, and the Shan. The energy pipelines run through Shan State. There's a history of insecurity: A CNPC co-owned facility in Shan State was attacked by guerillas in 2013.
India-Myanmar relations
India's interests in Myanmar aren't statistically as vast as China's, but are still important from India's perspective. The Tatmadaw, Myanmar's army, has proved crucial in India's attempts to rein in several rebel groups, mainly Naga, Manipuri, and from Assam that have for decades found sanctuary in Myanmar across its 1,600km-plus border with India.
Indeed, in June 2019 India's security establishment was abuzz after media outlets carried news of operations by armies of India and Myanmar to flush out rebels of a major faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang), and several satellite Manipuri and Assamese groups, among others. Called Operation Sunshine-2, and held between mid-May and the second week of June that year, it followed up a first phase in February. Some media reported joint operations.
This was denied by the Tatmadaw. A brigadier-general clarified -- via the grandly named Tatmadaw True News Information Team -- that there were no joint operations, but only “coordinated action” by the armies of the two countries in their respective territories; not cross-border action of the sort attributed to the Indian army at least thrice since 2015 across the border from Manipur -- and which took diplomatic outreach to smoothen. It's essentially a mix of military action backed by understanding between India and Myanmar to flush out remaining rebels from north-eastern India who have camps in north-western Myanmar, from where they carry out operations and oversee matters of donations -- both voluntary and extortive. Indian rebel enterprise in Myanmar is today mostly in tatters.
Indian businesses began a run to Myanmar more than a decade ago. Several Indian companies in areas as diverse as telecommunications, trading and manufacturing, and both onshore and offshore mining were lured by what was then billed as the next big thing among South-East Asian economies, expected to soon grow at 10 per cent a year. A World Economic Forum meeting in June 2013 in Myanmar's capital Nay Pyi Taw that drew major political and business interest from developed and developing countries alike seemed to place a seal of approval on the imminent gold rush. A major NGO critic described that rush as “greedy land grabbing and displacement, especially in ethnic areas with tentative and fragile peace processes.” Even in the fresh flush of liberalism of the time, Myanmar remained a contentious halfway house between absolutism and democracy.
India's Kaladan Multi Modal Transit Transport Project is an attempt to link its eastern ports to its northeastern region through Myanmar. The plan calls for Indian seaborne cargo to arrive at the hub of Sittwe port in Rakhine -- to the north of China's energy hub. It would then travel upriver for 225km to Sittwe Port to Kaletwa or Kalewa along the Kaladan River, and then switch to a road for the 62km run to the Indian border in the state of Mizoram and points beyond, essentially reactivating the old Teddim Road. Goods would similarly flow in the reverse direction. It is designed to ease pressure on the slim Siliguri Corridor. And it would all be built with Indian grants.
In that sense India would theoretically be as keen for peace to return to Rakhine as Bangladesh, but it's a tightrope walk to balance all the other quid pro quos with Myanmar -- not the least of which is Myanmar's place in India's strategic mind's eye as a buffer between China.
Given these slices of geo-strategic play, it's perhaps unrealistic to expect China or India -- even with India's rapidly growing economic and political ties with Bangladesh -- to move emphatically on the Rohingya crisis and its now seemingly indelible link with Bangladesh. Neither can the two countries be seen to be overtly aiding Bangladesh to mitigate the refugee crisis. Because: Myanmar.
Current solutions: Bhashan Char
On February 17, the ambassadors of China, Japan, France and Indonesia -- a country which has recently faced increasing arrivals of Rohingya refugees -- visited Bhashan Char, a sandbank island in the northern arc of the Bay of Bengal that was fashioned with donor money into a huge facility to house Rohingya refugees, for a first hand “sit-rep.” A delegation from the Bangladeshi premier's office was present there on the same day.
Currently, more than 30,000 Rohingya refugees have been translocated there from camps in southernmost Bangladesh. Many more will follow in a flow that removes these refugees from direct contact with Bangladeshis to a tightly controlled island enclave that is Bangladeshi territory.
It is difficult to predict what could follow in the face of obduracy from Myanmar and numerous regional and global interests vested in Myanmar. It will hardly be surprising if there is growing pressure from the international community to replicate the Bhashan Char initiative to other similar islands that pepper Bangladesh's southern coast to build vast refugee holding pens built with global money to mitigate an intensely regional and local crisis.
Perhaps such refugee containment will be replicated in Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries that lie in the Rohingya-refugee maritime arc. Perhaps Myanmar can finally be convinced, despite its genocidal anti-Rohingya rhetoric of the recent past, to accept repatriation of refugees in facilities monitored by international observers -- as a prelude to rehabilitation. This may seem like a pipedream, but the future will likely be a mix of realpolitik and humanitarian pressure.
What is certain is Bangladesh's approach. There is no option but to insistently and continuously, press its key allies for solutions to cool the tinderbox that is the Rohingya issue. It's either that or socio-political crises that Bangladesh can ill afford.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He has authored several books on history, ethnography, conflict resolution, and eastern South Asia. His most recent book is ‘The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India's Far East' (Simon and Schuster, 2022).
