INTERVIEW: Anthropologist Agnès Decorne on the Rohingya Crisis (INT)

Anthropologist Agnès Decorne has just returned from the Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar. She shares her observations in this interview.

MSF228085

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INTERVIEW: Anthropologist Agnès Decorne on the Rohingya Crisis (ENG)

Subt. English

WEBCLIPS: Rohingya Crisis. Interviews with Anthropologist & MSF head of emergency operation

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Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF228085

Date taken / Date Recorded 23/02/2018 12:00 AM

Country Bangladesh

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Photographer / videographer / producer Mohammad Ghannam

Usage Rights (MSF) External Media, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 3m29s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 357.39 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist 1/ ROHINGYAS FORCED INTO EXILE ONCE AGAIN
I went to Bangladesh 24 years ago, in 1992. There were already Rohingya who’d been forced to flee. It was the fourth time and this is the fifth.
Conditions aren’t the same. In 1992 they were driven to flee their country for less violent reasons than this time and the camps were better organised.
But in this emergency, they’re displaced in even greater numbers. The brutality has become too unbearable for them to be able to carry on living in their country.
Nearly everyone I met in 1992 was illiterate and couldn’t speak English. They’d fled with almost nothing. We can speak in English to people here now, so the situation’s totally different.
People are suffering. They’re stateless.
In Myanmar they’re called Bengalis and are considered foreigners. And in Bangladesh they’re called the Rohingyas from Myanmar, which excludes them from Bangladesh. So basically, they’re from nowhere.
(COUP)

2/ WHAT CONTACT DID YOU HAVE WITH THEM?
I spent 6 weeks in the camps meeting Majis (traditional chiefs), imams, men, women and traditional birth attendants. They all talked of the violence—the extreme violence—they’d witnessed. They’d seen their children being hacked to death and their wives raped. They also described their living conditions in the camp and how they’re living in poverty, that they have no work and depend on distributions.
People told me, “We live like beggars. Back home we had houses with beds but here we sleep on the ground, all of us in one room”. Their society is patriarchal, the man of the household provides for his family. They can’t fulfil their role because they rely on distributions and they lose their dignity and honour.

3/ WHAT ARE LIVING CONDITIONS LIKE IN THE CAMP?
The camp is a big town, with mosques, madrasas, schools, markets, hairdressers, doctors, pharmacists, documented and undocumented people, Bangladeshis and refugees. It’s getting organised. The aid organisations, and there are at least 250 of them, all leave at 4 in the afternoon and return at 9 in the morning. So at nightfall the camp manages on its own, with its own rules, codes and power structure they’ve managed to reinstate.