1 Introduction

The Rohingya people principally reside in the Arakan province of the state of Myanmar. The province is known in modern times as the Rakhine State (Rahman, 2010). While the people themselves have a long ancestral heritage in the land, the introduction of the term “Rohingya” is relatively recent. The people now called Rohingyas have been living in Rakhine since the period from 788 to 810 CE, as predominantly Muslim descendants of immigrants from the Middle East and later of Bengalis during the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries (Milton et al., 2017). The Myanmar government is largely controlled by Myanmar’s military junta of predominantly Burmese people, and they used their legislative authority to fully remove the citizenship rights of the Rohingya minority people in 1982. The infamous Myanmar Citizenship Act of that year officially recognizes 135 ethnic groups as part of Myanmar’s ethnic population, and this list does not include the Rohingyas (Parashar & Alam, 2019). This has led to the apparent stateless status of the Rohingya population, and has given Myanmar’s military apparatus free rein to violently persecute this community in their own ancestral lands. The Rohingyas faced persecution at levels seen in systematic genocides, with first their movements restricted by laws and legal obstructions, and soon their identity compromised via mandatory identification checks at designated checkpoints in the Rakhine region. Rohingyas faced harsh penalties, with fines and property confiscation on the basis of their now-compromised identification papers (Uddin, 2019). This led to the Rohingya people eventually being forcefully displaced from their homes. Forceful displacement refers to coerced and/or involuntary movement of a person or population away from their home or home region (Faye, 2021; Verme & Schuettler, 2021). The majority of the displaced Rohingya people took refuge in Bangladesh.

In the proceeding sections, this chapter discusses the history of the Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh across two time periods, which are pre-2017 and post-2017. The notable measures taken by the government in conjunction with local and international organizations are discussed within their relevant time frames.

2 History of Rohingya Settlement in Bangladesh

The history of Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh started long before the year 2000—around the 1970s—and the issue continues to be one of great concern for the host country. The discussion concerning this settlement can be divided into two time frames: pre-2017 and post-2017.

2.1 Pre-2017 Period

The flow of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh started in the 1970s, predating their arrival in larger groups in the early 1990s. The cause behind the first influx of Rohingya refugees that led to around 200,000 coming into Bangladesh (Ullah, 2011) has been described thus:

It is said that oppression, discrimination, violence and forced labour practices by the Myanmar authorities triggered an exodus of more than 250 thousand Rohingya Muslims to cross the border between 1991 and 1992. Since then the flow of this migration to the Bangladesh territory continued which contributed to shape a big figure living as ‘refugees’ in this country. (Uddin, 2019, p. 77)

The Rohingya exodus began around 1962 with the growing persecution of Rohingyas by the law enforcement and military organs of Myanmar, organs which are largely under the control of Myanmar’s Burmese military regime (Sohel, 2017). It has been argued that the British occupation before Myanmar’s independence in 1948 was the precursor to the Rohingya crisis that is so prevalent in Bangladesh and some other parts of the world today. With the “divide-and-rule” policy of the British colonial powers, seeds of dissent were sown in Myanmar’s fragmented ethnic diaspora of predominantly Buddhist Burmese populations (i.e., over 87%). The colonial powers preferred to recruit the Muslim populations that make up the present Rohingya population, and the support of these powers toward resistance fighters in Arakan and in the Mon rebellion has been said to have further fueled the resentment of the majority Burmese population in the long run, leading to the focused persecution of the minority Rohingya community observed today (Ansar, 2020).

The inclusion of 135 Burmese ethnic communities as part of Myanmar’s list of communities eligible for citizenship, while excluding the Rohingyas, indicates a clear systematic exclusion of this community. The results of this exclusion are quite apparent in the present timeline. The population has been reduced from around 3.6 million in the 1970s (Alam, 2019), to around 1 million in late 2020 (Reid, 2021) in Myanmar, with well over 1 million total in Bangladesh and other neighboring countries including Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand (Hamzah & Belford, 2015; Hookway, 2015). Systematic targeting of ethnic groups, even besides the Rohingya community, has been ongoing since the 1990s when a government composed of military generals was in power. Since that time, abuse and oppression have been ongoing against the ethnic Kachin, Karen, Rakhine, Rohingya, and Shan minority populations, while the government’s military force, named the Tatmadaw, cracks down harshly on their insurgencies and resistances (Grundy-Warr & Dean, 2011). For the Rohingyas specifically, however, the legislative move that stripped away their citizenship rights makes them a particularly unique target among the other oppressed ethnic minority communities, with some of their history impacting how the ruling militaristic government sees them as well. The results include a persecution similar to historical accounts of systematic genocide seen throughout human history that continues to this day—for there are still Rohingyas in Myanmar. The post-2020 pandemic situation has given the authorities even more opportunities to harass the Rohingyas in Myanmar and restrict their lives further in the name of mandatory regulations, the discussion of which still barely scratches the surface of this ongoing crisis (Roth, 2020).

2.2 Post-2017 Period: Ukhia and Tekhnaf

In 2017, around 600,000 Rohingya refugee people were living in Bangladesh (Milton et al., 2017), but the number swelled up to an estimated 800,000 Rohingyas (or more) in the following year (Martin et al., 2018). The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, in a meeting with Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, was quoted as saying regarding the Rohingya population living within the country that “Giving shelter to such a large number of Rohingyas is a big burden for us…we want to resolve the issue through discussions” (The Daily Star, 2019).

The Prime Minister continues to indicate that taking care of over 1.1 million Rohingyas is a significant burden for the country, which gives a picture of how much the Rohingya population within the country has expanded over the decades. The explosion of the population within the last decade has a lot to do with the latest exodus in 2017, with the addition of around 700,000 to the Rohingya population since that time (Rahman et al., 2020).

The overwhelming majority of these fleeing Rohingya people have taken up shelter in Bangladesh, where they had been slowly trickling in over the decades after the community’s first exodus (Mahmood et al., 2017). The latest large-scale exodus of Rohingya people to Bangladesh that began on August 25, 2017 and brought the 600,000 additional Rohingyas to the country put a mountainous logistical dilemma upon the government of Bangladesh regarding urgent humanitarian assistance (Cook & Ne, 2018). A chronology of the forceful displacement of the Rohingya people, and their subsequent entry into Bangladesh, is illustrated in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
A line graph of population of Rohingya refugees entering Bangladesh versus years 1991 to 2017. The number is 50000 in 1991. It increases to 250 thousand in 1992. After a decline to 50000 from 1995 to 2008, the number jumps to 250 thousand for 2009 to 2015. In 2017, the number is 850 thousand. Approximated values.

(Reproduced from Hassan et al., 2018)

Number of Rohingya refugees entering Bangladesh from 1991 to 2017 (representing the cumulative number of refugees, including pre-influx population)

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With over 1.1 million Rohingyas taking refuge in Bangladesh as of 2020, it has become increasingly difficult for the country to assist this growing population, as the country tackles issues the complexity of which are only rising (Islam et al., 2020).

The largest refugee camp, commonly referred to as the Rohingya Camp or the Kutupalong-Balukhali camp, is situated in the Ukhia and Teknaf sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar. The camps located in the two areas are all situated in the southeast corner of the country near the border (Ahmed, 2018). The current population in Bangladesh is around 1.1 million (Bakali & Wasty, 2020). Within the camp area, the Kutupalong-Balukhali camp is further divided into several zones, each accommodating different groups of Rohingya refugees. These zones include Kutupalong, Balukhali, Thangkhali, Jamtoli, and other smaller sections (Hassan et al., 2018). The camp spans a vast area, comprising densely populated makeshift shelters made of bamboo, tarpaulin, and other locally available materials. The camp’s infrastructure has evolved over time, with aid organizations and the Bangladeshi government working to provide essential services and support to the displaced population. Basic amenities such as water, sanitation facilities, healthcare centers, and education facilities have been established to address the immediate needs of the Rohingya refugees. The camp also has communal spaces, markets, and various community centers to promote social interaction and engagement (Ahmed, 2018).

3 Bhasan Char: A Temporary Destination

The Bangladeshi government has constructed a temporary shelter center in Bhasan Char (Fig. 2) in the Noakhali district to relocate some of the Rohingya people in order to reduce population pressures in Cox’s Bazar (Banerjee, 2020).

Fig. 2
2 maps and diagrams. The right map is of Bangladesh with the location of Bhasan Char Island marked on it. The left map is of the zoomed in map of the Bhasan Char Island. The new home for Rohingyas is located to the northwest section of the island. The diagrams lay out the plan on 120 plots of land.

(Reproduced from Islam et al., 2021)

Location of Bhasan Char Island

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This government initiative to ease the population pressure in the Cox’s Bazar region has, as of 2021, resulted in over 19,000 Rohingyas being relocated to the location (Nguyen & Lewis, 2022). The Rohingya population in Bangladesh has not been given any official refugee status, since Bangladesh is not an official signatory to the international instruments that protect the rights of refugees. Instead, their official status as stated by the government of Bangladesh is Forcefully Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN) (Roy, 2020). Despite not being directly affiliated with the international legal instruments such as the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its protocols, Bangladesh has been heavily involved in properly sheltering this large Rohingya population within its borders and seeing to their necessities with assistance from international and local NGOs (Milton et al., 2017). With cramped and congested camps and unsanitary conditions, the Rohingya population in the country lives with significant health risks. The health and sanitation facilities available to this community in the camp areas are very limited, leading to disease outbreaks lasting for much longer than what is considered natural for common infectious diseases such as diphtheria, diarrhea, and the covid-19 virus, among others (Islam & Nuzhath, 2018). Their housing conditions are dire, as the available housing space cannot cope with their booming birth rates—which currently sit at around 50,000 childbirths per year (Chowdhury et al., 2018; Uddin, 2015). This situation is a direct result of the 2017 mass exodus of the Rohingyas from Myanmar. The host community of Bangladesh has been welcoming to the fleeing Rohingya population who has sought shelter inside the country, and the government has since been collaborating with local and international organizations to help shelter them (Mia et al., 2021).

The Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are not officially recognized by the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) as refugees, but as FDMN (Rashid et al., 2021). The management of these FDMN in Bangladesh has thus far been done on a short-term basis, relying on the eventual repatriation of the Rohingya people in the country back to their home country of Myanmar while keeping the Rohingya population supported via aid and relief mechanisms with the help of NGOs, donor organizations, and UN assistance (Cook & Ne, 2018). The Rohingya refugees have been given shelter and humanitarian assistance through the aforementioned coordination between the GoB and these organizations via land allotted specifically for the Rohingyas in the two designated camp areas: Kutupalong in the Ukhia (also spelled “Ukhiya”) sub-district, and Nayapara in the Teknaf sub-district (Milton et al., 2017). This has led to many security complications for the GoB and the Rohingya population in the form of human rights violations by organized crime groups and a thriving black-market economy of narcotics, contrabands, and Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) (Taufiq, 2019), as well as health complications for the latter population in the forms of malnutrition, outbreaks of contagious diseases, declining material health, and poor family planning (Chowdhury et al., 2018; Islam & Nuzhath, 2018; Islam et al., 2020). The crisis that has resulted from the Rohingya population living inside the borders of Bangladesh has been further exacerbated both for the Rohingya population as well as the host country Bangladesh due to the lack of measurable success of the bilateral negotiations between the GoB and the Government of Myanmar (GoM). The GoM has agreed to take about 20,000 Rohingya people back within their borders with assurances of human rights guarantees and recognition of some civil rights (Faye, 2021; Parnini, 2013). However, despite the cooperation of the GoB with the UN in terms of upholding the principle of non-refoulement, hosting the returning Rohingya population with aid and relief support via joint cooperation with NGOs and International NGOs (INGOs), the Rohingya people are still living as a displaced population. It has been mentioned that a lack of collective responsibility on the part of the GoM was largely responsible for the crisis in the first place, and is why the issue persists as a crucial problem for the GoB and the destitute Rohingya population (Bhattacharya & Biswas, 2021).

4 Conclusion

The history of the Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh and the conflict arising out of the Rohingya crisis is a complex and multifaceted issue that has been shaped by a range of historical, political, and social factors. The settlement of over one million refugees in Bangladesh has created a range of economic, environmental, and social challenges, including competition for resources, strained infrastructure, and the risk of conflict. Throughout this chapter, we have explored the history of the Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh, from the first wave of refugees in the 1970s to the current crisis. We have seen how the settlement has grown over time, and how it has created economic opportunities and challenges for both the refugee and host communities. The crisis remains far from resolved, however, with ongoing challenges and risks to both the refugees and the host community. It is critical that the response to the crisis continues to prioritize the protection of human rights, the provision of basic services, and the establishment of a sustainable approach to managing the settlement. Overall, the history of the Rohingya settlement in Bangladesh and the conflict arising out of the Rohingya crisis presents a significant challenge to Bangladesh and the international community. However, with continued cooperation and commitment to addressing the root causes of the crisis, we can work toward a sustainable and just future for all those affected by the conflict. It is essential that the international community continues to engage with this issue and support the Bangladeshi government in providing essential services to the Rohingya refugees, while also addressing the needs of the host communities to ensure a peaceful coexistence. Only through a coordinated and sustained approach can we hope to achieve lasting peace and security for all those affected by this crisis.