Disaster resilient resettlement for Rohingya refugees

Abstract

“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity” -Erik Erikson In the context of modern territorially demarcated nation-states system, an individual without a national identity is an anomaly. This is because people cannot escape being connected to a state even when the state has disowned them. So, what are the criteria that identify an individual or a community with a particular nation? Who decides on the criteria? Is identity a natural entitlement or merely a conferred label? * * * History is full of examples of mass migration of displaced communities being forced to free their homeland due to both natural and manmade disasters such as floods, cyclones, droughts and war, political conflicts, riots respectively and their eventual resettlement in foreign lands in hope of a new life. Today, in many statecentric conflicts, people (citizens and non-citizens) are forced to leave their country for neighbouring countries that do not want them. The Rohingya are a stateless Muslim community belonging to the Rakhine State, Myanmar, who, in the last two years have been forced to flee their land due to communal clashes and ethnic unacceptance by the majority Buddhist nation. A major Rohingya crisis was recorded in 1977, when the “Dragon king operation” forced over 200,000 Rohingya across Bangladesh border (Mattern 1978). Although by 1979 most of them had been repatriated to Myanmar/ Burma (Habib2012), they were again pushed into Bangladesh because of violence in greater numbers in the early 1990s. The scope of the thesis looks at the possibilities implementing architecture as a tool for sustaining humanitarian aid in terms of of disaster resilient resettlement of the Muslim Rohingya Refugees on the cyclone and flood prone silt island of Thengar Char, and in the hope of improving the living conditions of the morally battered and socially outcast Rohingya community.