The Rohingya Camps: Let Down By the UN

Produced by the BBC, The Rohingya Camps: Let Down By the UN, is now available to stream and features our Executive Director, Eva Buzo. 

The Rohingya community fled their homes in Myanmar in response to a wave of violence in August 2017. Since then, they have lived in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, unable to return home. Currently, roughly 900,000 Rohingya are living in the Cox's Bazar refugee camp. 

In the camp, they are prohibited from working and dependent on rations of $8 per month. As this support decreases further, the conditions grow increasingly desperate and dangerous. Rival gangs wrestle for dominance, violently targeting those who speak out. Many Rohingya are deciding to take their chances with people smugglers and leave.  

The documentary highlights the everyday violence suffered by human rights activists in Cox’s Bazar and the failure of the UNHCR to protect them. Their safety concerns are being met with indifference; or, even worse, the advice to stop doing activist work. 

This is simply not good enough. As Eva puts it in the documentary, ‘We need an agency that says, we stand for the protection of refugees, and if we cannot fulfil our mandate, then we will leave.’