All bets are off in Myanmar -- and, consequently, with the Rohingya. I said this at a sit-rep and strategy conference in Dhaka this past February, in the presence of a former foreign secretary of Bangladesh and smattering of former defense services brass. Not for the first time I described the Rohingya as the Palestinians of South Asia and suggested a 15-20-year span for even the remotest chance for their resettlement and integrationist rehabilitation. The observation has been repeated several times since.
And it appears this needs to be said again at a time when the Myanmar-needs-to-take-back-Rohingya bandwagon has again raised its head:
All. Bets. Are. Off. In. Myanmar.
Certainly, Myanmar must take back the Rohingya.
But the question is: Take them back when? And how? And, precisely where?
Nearly all Myanmar is now upended. Of particular interest to Bangladesh is that rebels in the neighbouring Chin State and Rakhine in northwestern Myanmar have control over vast swathes of territory, further buttressed by often-independent and sometimes-coordinated attacks by so-called people’s defense forces or PDFs that have been in full fury since the military coup of February 2021.
Indeed, several Myanmar troops, and paramilitaries and police, have sought shelter in southern Bangladesh since rebel armies and began to attack and steamroll the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army, in the northwestern Chin State and coastal Rakhine. The latest group comprising a hundred crossed over as recently as last week.
So, Bangladesh is now in the unenviable position of sheltering both the million-plus Rohingya refugees evicted by successive Myanmar governments, both civilian-oriented and outrightly militarist, as well as occasionally harbouring those from the very regimes accused of genocidally evicting the Rohingya. Similar fleeing of Myanmar’s security forces and government personnel have also been recorded in Mizoram and Manipur, two among the four North-east Indian states bordering Myanmar, but nothing matches the scale of what Bangladesh has had to deal with and remains deeply vulnerable to.
Bangladesh, with the help of international donors and global and local NGOs has become somewhat adept in dealing with the Rohingya refugee crisis. At least, in attempting to geographically and quite desperately contain it in the teeming refugee camps in southernmost Bangladesh, and in the fallback offshore refuge of Bhasan Char not far from the Meghna estuary; it is both Bangladeshi territory and conveniently away from the mainland.
Much like other countries like China, India, Thailand, Singapore, and the largely uninterested remaining bulk of ASEAN -- which has for years literally written off the Rohingya -- Bangladesh remains quite clueless as to what to do with the engineered crisis that led to the Rohingya fleeing from Myanmar in the first place.
At times even well-meaning and otherwise erudite media houses fail to grasp this reality, as if fulminating is ever a solution to a crisis. Such keyboard warriors in media, and the ivory-tower policy wonks for whom reality is at best an abstraction and at worst an irritation, need to get with it: Myanmar doesn’t really give a damn either about the Rohingya, and, at a stretch, Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has two significant go-betweens in the region, China and India, to influence a Rohingya solution. Neither have.
They cannot even at present influence a Myanmar solution. The Rohingya solution is the lowest of low in the solutions food chain.
Here’s how it’s panning out.
There are battle zones around Kyaukpyu which threaten China's energy security. The Myanmar-China crude oil pipeline runs 771km from Madé Island off Kyaukpyu in Rakhine across Myanmar 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 tons of oil. State-run China National Petroleum Corp, or CNPC, runs the pipeline as a joint venture with the state-run Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise or MOGE. This helps China 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 begins at Ramree Island, 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.
Besides securing its large mining interests in central and northern Myanmar, this potential squeezing of its crucial energy pipeline, a part of the vaunted China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, have kept Chinese negotiators at work 24/7. Not just with the Arakan Army, the main rebel force in the vicinity, but with rebel forces all along the pipelines.
Equally, with its energy and trans-shipment interests centred around Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, India’s security and foreign policy establishments have found their policy in tatters.
The panic began with the fall of Paletwa in January 2024 to the Arakan Army. Paletwa, on the Kaladan river which is also used by the Tatmadaw to ferry supplies to and from Sittwe, is a key node for India’s planned Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project to link the Indian Mainland to its North-eastern states via Myanmar. It is designed to ease pressure on the 22km choke point of the Siliguri Corridor -- the so-called “Chicken’s Neck” between Nepal and Bangladesh that now links India to its northeast.
Reading the tea leaves better than most, the Adani Group exited from a marquee port-and-terminal project in Sittwe last year. It only highlighted what I’ve written earlier: the “via Myanmar” aspect of India’s Act East Policy, is currently off life support.
Unlike China, which has always placed its bets with multiple players in Myanmar, the same as it does in every location of its geo-political and geo-economic outreach, India signed up for the primacy of the Tatmadaw.
Since October 2023, both countries have had to rapidly, repeatedly reconfigure its approaches for a future that looks to be that of a multiverse. As this column discussed twice in January, the large to-do list in Myanmar will need to prioritize the de-escalation of the countrywide conflict, and a power-sharing concord with the Tatmadaw and multiple rebel groups as a possible transition to an uneasy, coalition-driven post-conflict rule. Or, even, the reality of dealing with largely autonomous entities in Chin and Rakhine, much like decades-long situation in the Wa and Shan areas to Myanmar’s northeast.
This is perhaps inevitable in the path to a de-escalation: Power-sharing with ethnic armed groups as after Myanmar’s independence in 1948, with several subsequent accords and peace treaties guaranteeing many of them various degrees of autonomy.
Another reiteration -- because this is a necessary step in any peacemaking and that often-forgotten quantum: keeping that peace. There also remains the tricky issue of de-mobilizing and de-weaponizing the estimated 65,000 members of various PDFs, besides cooling down the estimated 100,000 or so members of ethnic armed groups.
Let me repeat: Everybody will want a share of the future Myanmar. Only the surest, nimble-footed oversight by regional and global superpowers, with the oversight of the United Nations, ASEAN, or a new multilateral monitoring agency could ensure even the slimmest chance of stability in Myanmar. The question is: Will China permit such intervention in its geo-political backyard? Or will it be compelled to -- with an eye on securing its energy, trade, and investment pipelines?
In any case, the alternative to this cobbled-together stability is an Afghanistan between South Asia and Southeast Asia, a country of warlords playing deadly chess with each other with the help of their neighbourhood proxies.
Alas, the Rohingya simply don’t count in these equations.
Besides the blockade caused by ongoing conflict, the failure of repatriation was pre-destined. For more than a decade, the Tatmadaw collaborated with ultra-nationalist, extremist-fringe Buddhist clergy like Ma-Ba-Tha and that group’s subsequent avatars to legitimize the demonization of the Rohingya as foreign to Myanmar’s ethnic and religious ethos.
Once that atmosphere was created, the Rohingya were systematically robbed of their rights, made stateless, and then a majority ejected from Rakhine with the leverage of violence.
And now, in Rakine, comes instances of the Arakan Army brutalizing the remaining Rohingya. That is, brutalizing the remaining Rohingya beyond the abject humiliation of corralling them in what are effectively concentration camps.
There cannot be an effective atmosphere for repatriation of the Rohingya unless this Myanmar-wide poison against the Rohingya is reversed.
That future is hazy. While Bangladesh keeps up the all the diplomatic pressure it can bring to bear, Bhasan Char, and go-to options like Bhasan Char might be the only way out in the foreseeable future to both depressurize Bangladesh and give the Rohingya a just transition from the Gaza-like, grossly under-funded, and grossly over-burdened camps on the mainland they now inhabit.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Centre for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
