I’m posting this news because I have been following (for weeks!) the media’s hyper focus on the Chinese Virus and its potential threat to large refugee camps worldwide. Now it appears the first cases have arrived.
The value of social distancing (or lack of it) is about to be tested.
Over two weeks ago I told you that the carnage watch was on, see here.
In case you don’t think the Rohingya have anything to do with you, think again.
You need to know that Rohingya Muslims (there is no Muslim ban!) are being resettled in the US in large numbers (prior to the COVID shutdown) during the Trump Administration.
Here is one story about Rohingya refugees staging a political protest in Arizona a couple of years ago with a little information for you on the Rohingya back story.
See over 200 additional posts on Rohingya in myRohingya Reportscategory.
Their situation is much more complicated than the superficial media-created meme that depicts them as pure as the driven snow while Burmese Buddhists are their persecutors.
Coronavirus: Two Rohingya test positive in refugee camp
Rohingya camp at Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
Two Rohingya refugees have tested positive for coronavirus in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, officials say.
These are the first confirmed cases among refugees in Cox’s Bazar, where around one million Rohingya are encamped, a government doctor said.
Officials told the BBC that those infected were now being treated in isolation.
About 1,900 other refugees are now being isolated for tests.
The Rohingya in the crowded camps of Cox’s Bazar have been living under lockdown since 14 March.
In Greece, which is also home to large numbers of refugees, officials are hoping to relocate around 1,600 vulnerable persons from its camps to other countries as the pandemic eases.
Two migrants who reached Greece’s Lesbos island this week tested positive for Covid-19 and were isolated with no contact with refugee camps on the island.
Go here to read about the big Greek camps. A couple of newly arrived African migrants have tested positive for the Chinese virus, but notice that the big island camps are still largely not impacted.
On and off over the last few weeks I’ve been following media warnings that all hell is going to break lose in refugee camps worldwide where tens of thousands of refugees are packed together in filthy conditions (so we are told), and yet still no serious outbreak of the Chinese virus.
What gives?
Maybe it is too soon, maybe the crisis is yet to come, but if it doesn’t what does that tell us about the whole concept of social distancing as we stay behind our closed doors with the monster menacing on our doorstep.
I checked again this morning and the latest dire warning comes from PBS Frontlineabout the large Rohingya camp at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.
A week earlier the UN said it would be “devastating” if the virus arrived in the camp. Two weeks ago we reported on the anticipated “carnage” to come.
But before we get to that, it’s time for a trip down memory lane!
Ifirst wrote about Cox’s Bazar over ten years ago when even Time magazine was reporting that it was an Islamic terrorist hidey-hole.
This is what Time said (link is now dead, so it’s a good thing I snipped it!) about Cox’s Bazar:
Today, southern Bangladesh has become a haven for hundreds of jihadis on the lam. They find natural allies in Muslim guerrillas from India hiding out across the border, and in Muslim Rohingyas, tens of thousands of whom fled the ethnic and religious suppression of the Burmese military junta in the late 1970s and 1980s. Many Rohingyas are long-term refugees, but some are trained to cause trouble back home in camps tolerated by a succession of Bangladeshi governments. The original facilities date back to 1975, making them Asia’s oldest jihadi training camps. And one former Burmese guerrilla who visits the camps regularly describes three near Ukhia, south of the town of Cox’s Bazar, as able to accommodate a force of 2,500 between them.
That was all before the Rohingya became the media-created poster children for Muslim oppression by the Buddhists of Burma.***
Facing COVID-19 in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, Young Rohingya Help Prepare for an Outbreak
Every day, before dawn breaks, a student named Robi wakes up in the world’s largest refugee camp to pray.
Until a few weeks ago, many of those prayers were made at a local mosque, one of the few safe havens for his displaced community of Rohingya Muslims living in Cox’s Bazar, on Bangladesh’s sandy southeast coast. But the mosques and schools are now closed, as the threat of the novel coronavirus creeps closer to this vulnerable, tightly packed group.
The first case was confirmed within the local community last month, and the number of cases is growing. [That would be March, so where are the cases a month later?—ed]
Athena Rayburn of Save the Children
“We’re very much on borrowed time,” said Athena Rayburn, Save the Children’s humanitarian advocacy manager in Cox’s Bazar.
[….]
In late March, in a bid to stem the spread of the virus, the government restricted camp access to the more than 100 aid agencies working there. Now, only frontline workers deemed critical are being allowed in. They’re providing food and some medical aid, Rayburn said, but the services “are not currently sufficient to treat an outbreak.”
[….]
In Cox’s Bazar, there’s no such thing as social distancing.
Here, people pack together at an average of 100,000 people per square mile — far closer quarters than on a cruise ship. In these cramped quarters, accessing clean water and proper hygiene can be difficult. “People are very worried and upset,” said Mohammad Arfaat, a 25-year-old Rohingya filmmaker who lives in the camp with his family. “People are living together and sharing toilet you know, water pipe, everything, so if anyone is infected in the camp it will be very harmful.”
We will keep an eye on this story and report when/if the Chinese Virus arrives at Cox’s Bazar. (Bangladesh at present has over 6,000 cases.) If it doesn’t arrive in the camps in any significant way what will we learn from that lesson—that social distancing doesn’t matter, or perhaps that the media is whipping up fear (again) to create sympathy for the Rohingya?
We will be watching!
***I have an extensive archive with 231 previous posts I call Rohingya Reports for your reading pleasure (during your COVID incarceration). You need to know more about this ethnic group since it is one of the few Muslim refugee groups being admitted to the US in recent years. (Besides the Afghan special refugees.)
Public Radio International posted a glowing puff-piece yesterday about how the burgeoning Rohingya population in the Chicago area is now well established and members of the ‘community’ are becoming US citizens.
The article features one man in particular, but it is generally informative and gives me an opportunity to remind readers that there is no Trump Muslim ban. Certain countries might be temporarily excluded from sending refugees to America, but that prohibition does not extend to the Rohingya.
The Rohingya are strict adherents to Islam and are unwelcome in Burma and their original home in Bangladesh. For ambitious readers, I have been writing about them for over a decade and have archived over 200 posts in my category entitled, Rohingya Reports. (So glad to have all that material back!)
When I first began following the Rohingya, the US State Department had banned them from resettlement here.
What it’s like to become a US citizen after a lifetime of statelessness
Zakaria’s [Nasir Zakaria, the star of the story] path to US citizenship included years of hard work supporting his community. Three years ago he founded Chicago’s Rohingya Cultural Center, a community space on the city’s northwest side that has become a hub for some 1,600 Rohingya refugees who have settled in the area over the past decade. The center offers English lessons, Quran classes, cultural events and after-school homework help for children.
(I told readers about the founding of the Rohingya Cultural Center, here, in 2016.)
Zakaria family with judge (center). His wife is on the right.
The center also offers citizenship classes, which gives adults English-language skills and an overview of US history, politics and civics knowledge. The classes help them pass their naturalization interviews with US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees have been resettled to the US in the past five years, the majority of them between 2015 and 2016, according to State Department statistics.
The Trump administration has made steep cuts to refugee admissions in recent years. As more and more of Rohingya approach the five-year mark of permanent residency in the US, they are becoming eligible to apply for citizenship. Zakaria was among the first from the Chicago community to be naturalized.
Zakaria founded the Rohingya Cultural Center in 2016 with financial backing from the Zakat Foundation of America, an Islamic nonprofit based in Chicago. It’s often the first place local Rohingya refugees turn when they need help deciphering a cable bill, job application or letter from a government agency.
The idea for the center stemmed from his own experience acclimating to life in the United States.
Zakaria had already been granted refugee status in Malaysia, a safe Muslim country.
Is it America’s duty to give employment and public services to the world?
Zakaria fled Myanmar alone as a teen, he said, to escape capture by the country’s armed forces. He lived in Bangladesh, then Malaysia, where he was granted refugee status. But like other Rohingya refugees in Malaysia, he did not have access to public services, education or legal employment.
It would be another two decades before he was resettled to the United States in 2013, along with his wife, Laila Binti Mohamad Husan, and his grandfather. They were sent to live in Chicago. Zakaria and his wife now have three children.
[….]
On the way out, he picked up a voter registration form.
Just a quick mention so that you know that one advanced country after another is tightening borders and getting its illegal migrants sent home. We reported on Denmark yesterday, here. Heartburn at the UN?
Here is the Washington Post, but a similar story can be found at many media outlets:
India deports Rohingya Muslims, drawing U.N. ire
NEW DELHI — India deported seven Rohingya Muslims who had fled their native Myanmar back to their country Thursday, sparking concerns that the move could endanger their lives and violate international laws that protect refugees.
Rohingya protesters in New Delhi in 2017. Indian government says they have ties to terror groups. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/india-rohingya-muslims-terror-ties-170918134840406.html
The move comes as India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has escalated its rhetorical attacks on migrants who have entered the country illegally.
The party’s powerful president, Amit Shah, has repeatedly promised to deport all such migrants, and portrayed them as a security threat. At a public rally in September, he likened them to “termites.”
The northeastern state of Assam, where the seven men were imprisoned since 2012, has been ramping up efforts to identify and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally.
“If someone enters the country illegally, we will send them back,” Bharat Bhushan Babu, spokesman for India’s Home Affairs Ministry, said. When asked if that included people fleeing violence in their native countries, he said, “This is applicable to everyone.”
[….]
An additional 40,000 Rohingya refugees are thought to be in India, although only 18,000 are registered with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Many of India’s Rohingya refugees came before the most recent wave of violence in 2017. A statement from the UNHCR said the seven men deported Thursday were not registered with the agency.
Just so you know, Rohingya Muslims are being resettled in the US by the Trump Administration, see here. In June, Rohingya were the top ethnic group of Muslims we were admitting.
Burma is a Buddhist country and the Buddhists want to keep it that way.
That is the long and short of the battle between nationalist patriot monks and the Rohingya Muslim minority that has been increasingly aggressive in pushing for what they see as their rights.
Angry monks fighting for their country and their religion!
Of course, the global Left is on the side of the Rohingya and therefore so is Facebook!
I’ve been following the Rohingya controversy for over ten years and the Rohingya are far from being pure as the driven snow having instigated many of the violent conflicts between the government and themselves which has played out in rural villages, but you would never know that to hear the mainstream media spine. So now we learn that Facebook is hunting for monks on their platform in order to silence them and keep them from going around the biased media with their side of the story.
Burma (aka Myanmar) is far away. Why should Americans care?
