Smugglers responsible for mass atrocities in Thailand may be linked to capsized boat carrying refugees from Bangladesh to Malaysia
Activists fear a dangerous transnational trafficking network is being revived after at least 16 Rohingya refugees drowned in the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday morning.
Bangladeshi officials said a wooden fishing boat carrying about 138 people capsized near Bangladesh’s St Martin’s island in the early hours.
Continue reading...Refugees in Cox’s Bazar complain the international aid community does not utilise their experience and say the lack of education risks creating a ‘lost generation’
In a tea room just outside Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee camps, a group of young activists fiddle with their phones, which have suddenly started pinging in chorus now they are finally reconnected to the internet.
To circumvent a government internet blackout around the camps in Cox’s Bazar, they have to break a ban on travelling to nearby Bangladeshi towns, from where they can communicate and coordinate messages for the international community.
Continue reading...Khalid Mollah died while working among the thousands who dismantle old ships in Chittagong. Now, in a test case that could transform the industry, his widow is suing the firm that sold the vessel for scrap
Khalid Mollah was uneducated, illiterate and out of work when, in early 2009, he left his pregnant wife Hamida Begum to take the 200-mile bus ride to Chittagong from the small village of Gopai, in northern Bangladesh. The young man’s destination was Sitakunda, the notorious, 20km stretch of wide beach and tidal mudflats just north of Bangladesh’s fast-growing second city.
Here, nearly 25,000 people work in dozens of ship-breaking yards, steel-rolling mills and factories to recover and sell on every bit of plate metal, deck, mast, funnel, hatch, gangplank, wire, nut, cable, bolt, wood and rivet that makes up the world’s giant ships.
Continue reading...Children aged 11-13 will be first to benefit as government eases long-standing restrictions in effort to avoid ‘lost generation’
Bangladesh has confirmed it will lift restrictions on education for young Rohingya refugees, easing bans in place since the existing camps were established 30 years ago.
The government’s move to allow schooling for children aged 11-13 has been widely welcomed by activists and teachers.
Continue reading...Decreased flows caused by water-hungry neighbours, especially India, are damaging river communities
• All photographs by Kaamil Ahmed
Holding his downturned palm level with his waist, Musana Robi Das indicates how tall he was when he started working on Bangladesh’s rivers.
As a child he helped his father ferry villagers across local waterways. Now a tall and spindly 50-year-old, he has had to abandon that life as a boatman. The waters now sit so low that his services are unnecessary. So the past decade has instead been spent repairing shoes inside a dimly lit wooden booth in the village market.
Continue reading...Dhaka University demonstrators demand prompt action following reported rape of 21-year-old woman
Police in Bangladesh have arrested a man in connection with the alleged rape of a student at Dhaka University amid angry protests on campus.
More than 2,000 students and human rights activists – some brandishing placards asking: “Tell me, am I next?” – demonstrated this week following the alleged rape of the 21-year-old student. They demanded the death penalty for anyone found guilty of rape.
Continue reading...When Fazle Hasan Abed set out to lower death rates among poor children in rural Bangladesh, by teaching mothers how to treat dehydration, he was careful not to pay his field workers per household reached, but on how well their subjects, often illiterate or semi-literate mothers, could answer questions afterwards.
His approach, to reward high-quality instruction and rigorously monitor results of a door-to-door pilot scheme in the 1980s, fed lessons from the field back to research labs in Dhaka, and has been credited with saving countless lives from being lost to diarrhoea, a major source of child mortality in the country. It also propelled Brac, which Abed founded in 1972 as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee to help refugees returning to their homeland after the liberation war of 1971, to become one of the largest non-profit development organisations in the world.
Continue reading...Families tell how advances in healthcare and nutrition are helping to cut infant mortality rates
Continue reading...The Bangladeshi government is making life hard for young people trying to document levels of hardship in the world’s largest refugee settlement
For Azimul Hassan, 19, life before he entered the world’s largest refugee settlement was always busy.
He would wake early to visit his private tutor before school, then work late every evening to finish his homework. On Fridays, he would play football with friends – he was a striker.
Continue reading...Bill will allow refugees from nearby states to become Indian but not if they are Muslims
Indian lawmakers have approved legislation granting citizenship to migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan – but not if they are Muslim. Critics of the government said the legislation undermines the country’s secular constitution, as protests against the law intensified in some parts of the country.
The citizenship amendment bill seeks to grant Indian nationality to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis and Sikhs who fled the three countries before 2015.
Continue reading...With rape and domestic abuse endemic in the lawless refugee camp, safe spaces have been set up to help the women affected
In a small, dark hut within the world’s largest refugee settlement, a fan hums quietly as Faizal speaks. He says that last month his 12-year-old sister was raped here in their home. The little girl sits in silence beside him wearing a pink headscarf and red dress.
Rape is endemic in the camp in Cox’s Bazar. Although the exact number of victims is unknown, many Rohingya women who experienced rape and torture fleeing Myanmar report facing sexual violence again in their new home.
Continue reading...Even the prime minister has chopped the vegetable out of her official menu after monsoon caused Indian crop failure
Bangladesh has been forced to import planeloads of onions as the price of the cooking staple soared to record highs, an official said, with even the prime minister chopping the bulb from her menu.
The price of onions – a sensitive subject in south Asia where shortages can trigger widespread discontent with political ramifications – has climbed to eye-watering levels in Bangladesh since neighbouring India banned exports in late September after heavy monsoon rains reduced the crop.
Continue reading...Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence
In 1971, during the nine-month war that gave Bangladesh its independence from then West Pakistan, four sisters – Amina, Maleka, Mukhlesa and Budhi Begum – were abducted by Pakistani soldiers and local collaborators. They were among the more than 200,000 women held in rape camps and were detained for two and a half months.
“Twenty-two of us would lie like corpses in that room,” says Maleka as she explains how her elder sister Buhdi, “unable to bear the pain”, died before they were released.
Continue reading...With citizenship in Myanmar still denied, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh must either live under severe restrictions or move to an isolated island
Life in the world’s largest refugee camp has grown harder in the past few months. Mohammad, a Rohingya farmer who lost his leg fleeing violence in Myanmar, does not understand why.
“We got a lot more before in terms of food and help, but now it feels like we are not getting enough support from the government and NGOs. We are also more restricted in our movement,” he says, sitting on a bench outside his house, surrounded by discarded plastic bottles and rotting food.
The Bangladeshi government has launched a crackdown in the camp, shutting shops run by refugees, blocking internet services, confiscating mobile phones, putting up fencing and setting an 8pm curfew, meaning people can’t leave their homes at night.
Bangladesh appears to be getting frustrated with its more than 1 million guests. Politics is turning and it has been reported that locals in Cox’s Bazar are running out of patience. The government is finalising plans to move 100,000 refugees to an island in the Bay of Bengal and refugees wonder if it is all connected.
The state minister of foreign affairs, Shahriar Alam, said fencing was being put up for security reasons. “As far as the internet is concerned, 2G is still available. Due to the credible security concerns, [the] government has kept the internet access limited,” he says.
Continue reading...Student set on fire after refusing to withdraw sexual harassment claim against headteacher
Sixteen Bangladeshis have been sentenced to death for the murder of a 19-year-old student, Nusrat Jahan Rafi, who was burned to death in April after complaining of being sexually harassed by her school principal.
Among those found guilty were former members of the school’s administration, teachers and pupils – 12 of the 16 having confessed to participating in the killing in which Rafi was lured on to the school’s roof, doused in paraffin and set alight.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Upmarket brand, which has just launched UN partnership, opens investigation as female labourers in Bangladesh factory say they suffer regular abuse
Lululemon, an athleisure brand whose £88 leggings are worn by celebrities and Instagram influencers, are sourcing clothing from a factory where Bangladeshi female factory workers claim they are beaten and physically assaulted.
The Canadian brand recently launched a partnership with the United Nations to reduce stress levels and promote the mental health of aid workers.
Continue reading...Nine children sent to juvenile detention centres as remainder of group face up to two years in prison for failure to produce ID cards
Myanmar faces calls to release 30 Rohingya men, women and children arrested in September while trying to travel from Rakhine state to the city of Yangon.
A total of 21 Rohingya face up to two years in jail under Myanmar’s Residents of Burma Registration Act, which stipulates that citizens must be in possession of “registration cards” to prove their identity.
Continue reading...The country has undergone an economic miracle in recent years, albeit at huge cost to its garment workers. But things are finally starting to improve for them
Tasnia Akter has come home. It’s a public holiday in Bangladesh, the one time of year the 25-year-old can leave the mayhem of the city behind and see her family: her mother, her aunt.
And her daughter.
Continue reading...Muslims who fled persecution in Myanmar face prospect of further isolation as government orders operators to shut down services
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims living in refugee camps in Bangladesh face a communications blackout after the government ordered a ban on mobile phone services and sim cards.
The country’s telecommunications regulatory body cited security fears and illegal mobile use as it ordered operators to shut down services in the overcrowded camps in the south-eastern border district of Cox’s Bazar by next Sunday.
Continue reading...Complaint against International Organization of Migration of ‘severe concerns’ over treatment of rescued migrants in Tunisia
The UN migration agency is the subject of a formal complaint after “severe concerns” were raised about its treatment of Bangladeshi migrants, including children.
A Tunis-based NGO, Forum Tunisien pour les Droits Economiques et Sociaux (FTDES), filed a complaint to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) this month, after migrants alleged officials and diplomats had put pressure on them to return home following weeks at sea.
Continue reading...