Eva Buzo joins JiC for this guest post on the documentation of human rights abuses and atrocities committed against the Rohingya people. Eva is an Australian lawyer, and the Executive Director of Victim Advocates International. She lived in Cox’s Bazar between November 2017 and September 2019.
A Rohingya refugee camp in Cox Bazar, Bangladesh (Photo: RedR Australia)
The term ‘overdocumentation’ is frequently associated with the situation facing the Rohingya. As a humanitarian crisis that took place in a relatively accessible area to civil society and governmental organizations, groups from all over the world came to document the gross human rights violations that had occurred in northern Rakhine state and that led to the exodus of over 700,000 people from Myanmar to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This process of documentation occurred almost in real-time, as a steady stream of new arrivals into the camps in Bangladesh brought new stories of horror from events that were still unfolding.
But overdocumentation is not an accurate description of what happened. Today, a careful review of the masses of information gathered in 2017 and 2018 reveals gaps in the story. A victim interviewed by the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights recounts,
‘When we were fleeing, we stayed in Ba Da Nar overnight. The town was empty and full of bodies.’
When Ba Da Nar is cross-referenced against the wealth of existing reports on crimes committed against Rohingya, there are no matches. In this supposed crisis of overdocumentation, how is it possible to find nothing about a town that was apparently was wiped out?
Commentary and discussions dedicated to gaps in the documentation of the Rohingya crisis have thus far focused on the form of the material collected, and the distinction between “human rights documentation” versus the collection of “evidence” for use in international criminal prosecution. However, when it comes to the Rohingya, there was a far more fundamental problem at play – the lack of coordination of evidence / documentation efforts.
In the scramble to piece together the scope and scale of the clearance operations against the Rohingya, the numerous groups who came to Cox’s Bazar neither coordinated in any meaningful sense, nor benefitted from each other’s knowledge. Unsurprisingly, this has led to significant duplication on one hand, and large gaps in the narrative of what happened in northern Rakhine state on the other. The fact that these gaps exist would certainly seem to weaken the position adopted by Myanmar’s in the December 2019 provisional measures hearing before the International Court of Justice that the number of 10,000 deaths was an “exaggeration” and could not constitute an attempt to destroy the Rohingya ethnic group. Regardless, effective documentation processes are important. The purpose of this article is to suggest why these gaps exist in relation to the Rohingya, and to suggest a path to a more effective and complete process in future situations of humanitarian crisis.
The Problem
The scene in Cox’s Bazar following the clearance operations of August 2017 was a crowded one. As the Rohingya fled across the border from Myanmar at a rate of up to 9,000 people per day, they were settled across 30 camps located between Kutapalong and Teknaf, 55 kilometres south. Almost 600,000 refugees, two-thirds of the total population in Bangladesh, were settled in “megacamp” in Kutapalong, the world’s most densely populated refugee camp. The camps are a labyrinth, with some inhabitants reporting that they were too afraid to leave their shelters in case they got lost and couldn’t find their way back.
In this environment, groups came to the camps to investigate and document the alleged atrocities on short-term missions that invariably lasted between 7 and 14 days. A quick scan of the “Methodology” section of some of the reports show that groups were often conducting between three and five interviews each day. These short-term “parachute” missions which aim to obtain as much information as possible as quickly as possible, seem to have been the only model used by the teams. This model gave rise to a series problems.
A) A small pool of “fixers”
Parachute missions don’t allow sufficient time for investigators to learn the lay of the land; they must hit the ground and start interviewing. To do this, they rely on “fixers”; people from within the affected community who connect alleged victims and investigators, and often act as translators.
It is a marked feature of the early reports on the Rohingya crisis that they discuss events in the same three to five areas. This is a result of the early groups using fixers drawn from the same small pool. Some of these fixers advertised their services on Twitter, others would wait at the airport at Cox’s Bazar and approach foreigners arriving and offer their services. For a daily fee of between $100-200, they would accompany the teams and take them to speak to victims. Continue reading
