Camp residents ponder their circumstances and options with growing hopelessness
Interviewees expressed their sense of confusion and frustration as they ponder whether they will be able to
repatriate. A 33-year-old father of two explained, “The conditions here make me want to go back right away. But
then, when I think about how I lost everything and all the reasons I left…I am remembering everything that was
denied to us. I think I would need Myanmar citizenship to actually be able to go back safely. I am so confused. Not
only me, thousands of others also.”
A woman whose parents still live in Myanmar described her family’s confusion about how to reunite. “We are
thinking of going back there, while they are thinking that they should come here. My parents are telling me,
hopefully you will come home. I cry when I talk to them. They tell me to be patient, to wait for repatriation.”
For a community seeking a ray of hope, the ICJ provisional measures ruling announced in January 2020 was cause
for cautious optimism, though a 47-year-old father of seven wondered how long it would take to go home. “I cannot
predict the future. It’s not possible. We are guessing that after getting justice we will be able to go home. I think it will
take at least five years, because our crisis is now being dealt with at the international level. The ICJ process will take
at least two or three years to reach a final decision, and other mechanisms will take time as well.”
A woman who has lived in Bangladesh since 2006 said, “I want to go back to Myanmar, in theory. I have two aunts
there. But my children grew up in Bangladesh. I have nothing left in Myanmar. Only if the Myanmar government
were willing to accommodate the repatriation and rights of all Rohingya—then I would go.”
A young man said that because survival is so difficult, “People are always thinking about sending their children out
of the camp.” He described his uncertainty about whether repatriation would be possible, but he felt that it would
be impossible to sustain life in the camps given the present conditions. He estimated that many camp families were
“working to send their children abroad because they cannot see any other way to invest in their futures.”
Another young man described his family’s overall sense that there is “no hope” for repatriation. Their vague plan
is to “try hard to get citizenship somewhere, anywhere” in order to pursue a better future. The man said he was
overwhelmed by the uncertainty of the future. “Sometimes I try to focus and think about what to do, but my mind
gets too overwhelmed. I’m a human like everyone.”
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS ON ASSETS,
LIVELIHOODS, AND HARDSHIP
parents, which, again, often force families to turn to
traffickers for a way out.
Camp residents confront complex and intersecting
financial pressures despite the efforts of the government
of Bangladesh and humanitarian agencies to provide for
their basic survival needs. Many interviewees gave detailed
accounts describing how the lack of options for overcoming
these pressures leaves them with little recourse but to turn
to negative coping mechanisms. This situation creates an
atmosphere in which families’ hopelessness and worry
precipitate risk-taking and endangerment.
But the decision to flee the camps is affected by more than
these immediate financial pressures. Nearly all households
state that they live in fear of forced repatriation, and their
lack of access to news and information via internet allows
rumors and fears to spread. These existential fears combine
with concerns about lack of education and livelihoods
shared by nearly all households, and people decide that the
camp situation is untenable.
These findings should be of great concern to decisionmakers, who have a duty to work for repatriation and a
responsibility to maintain the camps as places of refuge
and safety in the meantime. If the camp environment is
not stabilized through expanded access to livelihoods,
there is every reason to expect that families will become
even more fractured, as people continue to take risks to
achieve mobility. This is likely to occur in ways that damage
regional security and may diminish the possibility of
sustainable solutions to the Rohingya crisis in the future.
Households are trapped in a cycle of hardship, poverty, and
indebtedness that impairs their ability to be resilient and
overcome challenges. With so many households having no
income or safety net, camp residents unsurprisingly turn
to lenders and smugglers instead. This study establishes
the direct link between poverty and indebtedness and the
decision to flee the camps by engaging with traffickers. The
lack of livelihood options also exacerbates the pressures
of marriage and dowry faced by young women and their
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