TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
They want to return home only if…
Building cooperation: Adolescents and children carry bamboo poles along a shallow river close to the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Ukhiya, Bangladesh
Change Size
B
uilding cooperation: Adolescents and children carry bamboo poles along a shallow river close to the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Ukhiya, Bangladesh. The bamboo is used as material for the refugee shelters and training workshops.
To live in a refugee camp is obviously not a pleasant life that anybody would want. It is not a lifestyle that people would dream about. Stories of such a life are dominated by accounts of hardship for the inhabitants.
However, the refugees had to flee their home countries and migrate to other countries for the sake of their safety. After years of living abroad, they do still dream of returning home.
Mohammed Yousef, 24, was working along with other refugees at a bamboo treatment plant in Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on a sunny afternoon on Sept. 17 when The Jakarta Post and other journalists from 11 different countries paid them a visit. Yousef is an ethnic Rohingya refugee from Myanmar who has been living in the camp and is taking part in a bamboo-replanting project organized by the United Nations and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC).
Sharing his story with the Post, Yousef admitted that he and his fellow Rohingya refugees there would still like to go back to their homeland.
“Actually we are happy here because everything — health services and food — is provided. If we could, however, we still want to go back to our country. But, we need to get our full citizenship in order to go back [to Myanmar],” Yousef said.
Gulsan, a fellow Rohingya refugee, recounted how in Myanmar, she technically did not have individual freedoms, such as being able to go to school, let alone to enter college.
“We dream of receiving the same treatment and rights [as other Myanmar people] inside Myanmar. We do want to go back home, but they should confirm our citizenship status, issue citizenship cards and ensure security for us,” she told the Post.
In a separate interview, Syrian refugees Rouba Osman, Fatima Hinka and Hadije Mahmoud shared the same idea about returning back home. The three gave their accounts when the Post and international colleagues visited their refugee shelter, known as the Life House, which is located in Kucukcekmece, a suburb of Istanbul.
“I am happy that my 12-year-old son is going to a Turkish boys’ school. We live in harmony here. We have friendly neighbors, who frequently pay visits to us and vice versa,” said the 56-year-old Hadije.
“But still, this is not our home country. If the situation [in Syria] was conducive, we would definitely want to go back,” she added.
Fellow refugee Fatima agreed that she would like to return home if the situation in Syria went back to like before the conflict erupted.
In addition to Hadije and Fatima, Rouba was of the opinion that it was not a luxury to live in Turkey given fact that they are not Turkish citizens.
“Wherever we go here in Turkey, it is not our home. So for us, home [in Syria] is still the best place to live and if we really could go back there it would be much better than here,” she said.
“Also particularly because we are Syrian refugees, whenever we come here, there will always be people unhappy with our presence and wanting us to get out. So, it is not completely safe to live here in Turkey […]. We are indeed strangers here,” Rouba added as tears rolled down her face.
She also finds it difficult to get in touch with local people, who sometimes look down on her and fellow Syrians.
“They sometimes pity us and treat us like beggars. Actually, we did not choose to become refugees and live away from our country,” said Rouba.
Having not seen her mother, sisters or her children for about five years, Rouba is not even sure whether she could go back to Syria because of the prolonged conflict there.
Refugees taking shelter in Turkey are mostly those affected by the ongoing Syrian civil war. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recorded that Turkey is host to over 3.6 million registered refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. The UN agency itself has delivered aid amounting to US$30 billion between 2011 and 2018 in refugee assistance.
As returning to Syria remains an uncertainty because of the ongoing conflict, Turkey has focused on how to cater to the Syrian refugees by addressing their legal status and providing them with basic needs, employment and education.
Meanwhile, more than 1 million Rohingya refugees are currently living in Cox’s Bazar. The Rohingyas are a stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar.
The latest exodus from Myanmar began on Aug. 25, 2017, when violence broke out in Rakhine state, driving more than 742,000 Rohingya to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh.
— Texts and photos by JP/Nurni Sulaiman
