Can Muhammad Yunus Help Rohingya Refugees?

Contents

Join to obtain South Asia Transient in your inbox each Wednesday.Signal as much as obtain South Asia Transient in your inbox each Wednesday.

Welcome to International Coverage’s South Asia Transient.

The highlights this week: Interim Bangladeshi chief Muhammad Yunus grapples with rising Rohingya refugee arrivals, Sri Lanka gears up for its presidential election this month, and renewed political tensions erupt in Pakistan.

This week, Muhammad Yunus, the pinnacle of Bangladesh’s interim authorities, known as for the expedited resettlement of Rohingya refugees to 3rd international locations. Bangladesh hosts practically 1 million Rohingya right this moment, a lot of whom fled army violence in Myanmar in 2017; many reside in large refugee camps within the metropolis of Cox’s Bazar.

Intensifying battle in Myanmar has seemingly prompted Yunus’s urgency: Round 8,000 Rohingya refugees have crossed the border into Bangladesh in current months, in keeping with Bangladeshi officers.

The Rohingya situation is one in every of many daunting coverage challenges for Yunus and the interim authorities, which can also be grappling with restoring legislation and order following the compelled resignation of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina final month, stabilizing a sputtering financial system, and initiating large-scale institutional reforms. However Bangladesh has a preventing likelihood at addressing the refugee disaster, largely due to Yunus himself.

Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist and microfinance pioneer, enjoys shut ties with Western governments and the worldwide donor group. His prominence and status abroad lend him the credibility to make efficient pitches for elevated humanitarian support for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh—the primary and most instant step wanted to sort out the disaster.

The worldwide group has offered beneficiant help, together with $2.4 billion from Washington since 2017. However guaranteeing continued support is important: Competing humanitarian crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere danger distracting from the plight of the Rohingya, at the same time as hundreds extra refugees enter Bangladesh. The Hasina authorities had made an $852 million attraction for help this 12 months, however the United Nations warns it has been underfunded.

The second and harder step is the resettlement course of. Given the quickly worsening battle in Myanmar, Bangladesh’s interim authorities properly seems unwilling to proceed the Hasina administration’s coverage of searching for to repatriate some Rohingya again to Myanmar, together with involuntarily.

Negotiating third-party resettlements gained’t be straightforward; up to now, few international locations have stepped as much as host Rohingya refugees. (India, Malaysia, and Thailand host a mixed 345,000 individuals.) However right here Yunus may very well be an asset in leveraging his star energy and connections to the donor group to get Western governments to think about internet hosting refugees.

Yunus has a chance this month: He’s anticipated to attend the annual U.N. Basic Meeting conferences in New York, which is able to give him a distinguished platform to make an attraction to the world, each via his speech and on the sidelines. It could be troublesome: The sheer scale of the Rohingya problem, competing donor priorities, and the uneasiness of many governments about taking over refugees might trigger him to fall brief.

Nevertheless, the stakes are excessive for the Rohingya refugee group, in addition to for Bangladesh. Rohingya refugees face main hardships, residing in overcrowded camps and relying virtually totally on humanitarian support. Starting in 2020, Dhaka relocated hundreds of refugees to a abandoned and flood-prone island. As a result of Bangladesh doesn’t present Rohingya refugees with a path to citizenship, many are disadvantaged of fundamental providers, together with entry to schooling.

Lately, many determined Rohingya refugees have boarded flimsy boats from Bangladesh and sought to flee to Southeast Asia by sea—however some have died en route, and others have confronted violent resistance on arrival. In the meantime, Bangladeshi officers and worldwide specialists fear in regards to the long-term prices for Bangladesh of internet hosting so many refugees, from worsening financial stress to radicalization dangers.

In the end, the Rohingya have a possible highly effective champion in Yunus, if he’s up for the duty of advocating on their behalf on the worldwide stage. It’s a problem for which he’s eminently certified.

Sri Lanka nears crucial election. Sri Lanka is gearing up for a presidential election on Sept. 21. The Sri Lankan presidency is a strong put up, not a ceremonial one. The race is actually between three leaders: present President Ranil Wickremesinghe; Sajith Premadasa, a former Wickremesinghe ally who fashioned his personal social gathering; and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, whose anti-corruption messages resonate with younger Sri Lankans.

Namal Rajapaksa—a member of the household dynasty that dominated Sri Lankan politics for years till his uncle, former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, resigned in 2022 following mass protests—can also be a presidential candidate.

The election might be a referendum on two important points: Wickremesinghe’s dealing with of the financial system, which has rebounded since a debt default in 2022 however stays fragile, and broader views of Sri Lankan politics. Many Sri Lankans need to transfer away from the family-driven politics of the Rajapaksas—a sentiment that disadvantages Wickremesinghe, who’s near the household and served out the rest of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s time period.

Political tensions in Pakistan. Final Sunday, hundreds of supporters of imprisoned former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan held a rally outdoors Islamabad to demand his launch. It was the most important demonstration that Khan’s social gathering, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), has held since his imprisonment greater than a 12 months in the past.

Pakistani authorities responded with a flurry of arrests on Monday, detaining different social gathering leaders, together with PTI’s present chairman (who was launched on Tuesday). In a dramatic growth, legislation enforcement officers entered Pakistan’s Parliament, reduce the facility, and arrested a minimum of 11 PTI lawmakers. On Wednesday, Nationwide Meeting Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq suspended 5 safety officers posted to the Parliament Home.

In accordance with police statements, arrests had been made on fees associated to protesting past the allotted finish time for the Sunday rally, not utilizing preapproved roads for the demonstration, and throwing stones at police. However what seemingly shook up the federal government had been incendiary feedback made by protest leaders, together with reportedly threatening to make use of drive to free Khan if he’s not launched within the subsequent few weeks.

These occasions will solely deepen the continuing confrontation between PTI and Pakistan’s management. PTI sees the federal government and army as unrelentingly repressive, whereas Pakistani officers view PTI as a harmful entity that must be sidelined.

Recent unrest in Manipur. On Tuesday, officers within the Indian state of Manipur imposed curfews in some areas and shut down the web after the most recent section of ethnic violence that has flared for greater than a 12 months. This month, members of the Meitei ethnic majority clashed with minority Kukis—reportedly over a Meitei demand for particular standing that might enable them to buy land in areas the place Kukis and different minority teams reside.

Armed teams used heavy weaponry, together with drones and rockets, within the preventing. The curfew and web shutdowns had been introduced after college students staged protests towards the violence, which prompted police to reply with tear gasoline. The scholars have demanded that prime safety officers within the state be fired for not ending the violence.

The violence in Manipur has turn into one in every of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s largest inside safety crises. Neither safety crackdowns nor talks that New Delhi has performed with Meiteis and Kukis have ended the violence, which Indian officers have beforehand blamed partially on worsening unrest in neighboring Myanmar.

In current days, senior Indian officers have made robust statements about India’s relationship with Pakistan. On Aug. 30, Exterior Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar stated the “period of uninterrupted dialogue with Pakistan is over.” Final Sunday, Protection Minister Rajnath Singh said that India is ready to start dialogue with Pakistan provided that it stops supporting terrorism in Indian-administered Kashmir.

However each statements merely reiterated present coverage. India hasn’t held any sort of formal dialogue with Pakistan in a few years—whether or not interrupted or uninterrupted—and it has lengthy insisted on Pakistan stopping terrorism as a precondition for talks.

One would possibly conclude that Jaishankar and Singh had been telegraphing New Delhi’s response to Islamabad’s invitation to Modi to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit hosted by Pakistan in October. India has publicly acknowledged receiving the invitation, however it has not indicated if it’ll settle for it or not.

The officers’ feedback counsel that India is in no temper to interact with Pakistan, even on a multilateral degree. That wouldn’t be a shock: Modi’s diminished mandate after disappointing outcomes on this 12 months’s elections highlights the significance of his core political base—which doesn’t help engagement with Pakistan.

However robust discuss doesn’t rule out a special sort of end result. Final 12 months, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif accepted Modi’s supply to the annual SCO summit that India hosted, although he participated just about. (Then-Pakistani International Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari attended one other SCO summit in India earlier in 2023.)

On Tuesday, Pakistani media reported that India’s commerce minister will just about attend a Pakistan-hosted SCO assembly this week. This means the chance that Modi, like Sharif, might additionally tune in to the SCO leaders’ summit subsequent month. Nonetheless, he would seemingly lose little by skipping it.

Within the Categorical Tribune, professor Moonis Ahmar examines the prospects for enhancing Pakistan-Bangladesh ties after years of false begins. “Pakistan’s efforts failing to yield outcomes means both the Yunus-led caretaker authorities doesn’t need to take the danger of positively responding to the overtures from Islamabad … or it needs a while to give you a coverage framework for absolutely normalising relations with Islamabad,” he writes.

Within the Every day Star, professor Mustahid Husain highlights the disparity between authorities spending on educational analysis and surveillance throughout Bangladesh’s Hasina period. It “lays naked a authorities that evidently favoured management over creativity, and surveillance over innovation,” he writes. “The long-term penalties of this misguided prioritisation may very well be extreme.”

In Kuensel, journalist Yangchen C. Rinzin laments current surveys exhibiting a lack of know-how in Bhutan about entrepreneurship. “Given such restricted consciousness about entrepreneurship, it might be impractical to count on younger individuals to pursue entrepreneurship as a profession possibility,” she writes. “The attention is essential as a result of increased entrepreneurial consciousness is linked to a better intention to start out a enterprise.”

Michael Kugelman is the director of the South Asia Institute on the Wilson Heart in Washington.