Reposted from The Irrawaddy, February 11, 2019
By TONY WATERS
In 2017 and 2018, between 600,000 and 800,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar following attacks and clearance operations targeting their villages and coordinated by the Myanmar military. The result is the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutupalong, situated in a low-lying corner of Cox’s Bazar District in Bangladesh. The camp is there because the Bangladesh government saw it as a humanitarian way to deal with the refugee influx and preferable to a military operation. The international community, led by the UNHCR, was invited to receive the refugees and coordinate the establishment of a large camp in the low-lying district.
The initial success of this operation is not in doubt. The Bangladesh government, UNHCR and international partners successfully housed hundreds of thousands — perhaps as many as 1 million — refugees in a manner that recognized their needs for protection in a situation that could otherwise lead to a war involving Myanmar, Bangladesh, and other countries. Mobilizing the international donor community and establishing such refugee camps quickly is indeed what the UNHCR and the international refugee regime is good at, and it is why they are such a positive force in the world for blunting the consequences of acute conflict. In recent decades the UNHCR has done this in the former Yugoslavia, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
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Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.