When I was twelve years old I walked into a used bookstore and picked up a novel with the word "Uprising" stamped across the spine. Upon further inspection I learned that the book was about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory strike of 1909 and the subsequent fire that occurred in March of 1911. The fire arose directly from the very issues the strikers had been protesting, namely appalling work condition such as locked doors, inadequate water pumps, and the lack of smoking regulation. The tragedy killed 146 immigrant workers, and from the moment I closed the book I went on a quest to learn more about it. Since then, I have been obsessed with learning as much as I can about human rights violations all across the world, including the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2011. I have a strange sort of affinity to the small, impoverished nation of Bangladesh, so much so that I hope to travel to Bangladesh one day in an attempt to help alleviate some of the poverty there. I would also like a career in the area of international relations with a focus on development and industry. From the moment this project was assigned I knew I wanted to do a topic relating to human rights. Upon further investigation I learned more about the Rohingya crisis than I had seen in headlines, and it fascinated me. Reminiscent of the events of the Rwandan genocide, I was appalled at how the world was still allowing this to happen right under their noses. In writing this paper, my hope was to shed light on this crisis to inform someone, anyone of what was happening.
Before delving too deeply into the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the third world, I hypothesized that the flood of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh would seriously stress the diplomatic ties between Myanmar and Bangladesh especially. From an AP Human Geography project on Bangladesh last year, I recalled that Bangladesh has one of the highest poverty rates in the world at around 25% and that the country has very few resources to supply to the 156 million people living within its borders ("World"). Adding a million more refugees from Myanmar could not possibly alleviate this stress, and so theoretically tensions between the nation receiving the refugees and the nation pushing them out would rise dramatically. From the same project I knew that Myanmar and Bangladesh already had a rocky relationship due to drug smuggling across their border. I expected my research to be a great amount of inference on my part as political tensions are rarely predictable. As I also expected, it was difficult to find articles that were focusing on the implications of the crisis rather than the details of the crisis. The majority of the articles I was able to find were from newspapers reporting on the crisis, but I was able to pull a fact or two from each regarding statements each country made about the other to better understand the political atmosphere in the region. The most surprising part of the research to me was the lack of interference from groups in the region. In my research I found many, many declarations form organizations such as the United Nations, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations calling for Aung San Suu Kyi to condemn the violence in her nation, but as far as I could tell no significant consequences came from the declarations. In a September summit of of ASEAN the topic was not brought up at all, or at least not on significant enough terms to show up in my research. It seemed to me as though the organizations were not willing to intervene with a country's "sovereignty" and their ability to govern how they chose even when human rights are being shredded. As of December 17th or 2017, 655 thousand refugees have been registered in Bangladesh's Cox Bazar (ISCG). “ISCG Situation Report.” Reliefweb, 18 Dec. 2017. Accessed 27 Dec. 2017. "The World Factbook: BANGLADESH." Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, 12 Jan. 2017. Accessed 27 Dec. 2017. |
Header image borrowed from "Pinterest"
Refugee chart borrowed from "the Economist"
Refugee chart borrowed from "the Economist"