Bangladesh’s Predicament: Will the Humanitarian Corridor Fulfill Its True Purpose or Spiral into Proxy Warfare?

Sanjoy Kumar Barua

Bangladesh, a nation lauded for its developmental strides and humanitarian ethos, now stands on a perilous precipice.

What began as an ostensible effort to assuage the suffering of over 1.3 million Rohingya refugees has transmogrified into a Faustian bargain of geostrategic proportions.

At the heart of this maelstrom lies the proposed Silkhali Corridor—a “humanitarian” artery through Bangladesh’s southeastern frontier into Myanmar’s fractious Rakhine State.

Here, in the humid environs north of Teknaf, an inconspicuous border hamlet has been repurposed into a clandestine logistics hub—its thick forests, adjacent artillery ranges, and upgraded airports all co-opted to serve an insurgency that could engulf Bangladesh in its own conflagration.

On Sunday, Bangladesh’s transitional government officially agreed, in principle, to a United Nations request to establish this humanitarian corridor.

As Foreign Affairs Adviser Md. Towhid Hossain explained, “The UN wants to create a humanitarian corridor through Bangladesh to send humanitarian aid to Myanmar’s Rakhine State. We have agreed, subject to conditions.”

While Hossain refrained from elaborating on these conditions, his remarks laid bare Dhaka’s tortured calculus: balancing humanitarian imperatives with existential national security concerns.

On its face, the Silkhali Corridor promises nothing more than food, water, and medicine for beleaguered civilians trapped between Myanmar’s military junta and the insurgent Arakan Army (AA).

Yet beneath this veneer lurks a nefarious stratagem: a Western-orchestrated proxy war engineered by American planners seeking to erode China’s influence over the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) and diminish Naypyidaw’s strategic heft in the Bay of Bengal.

Recent visits by senior U.S. diplomats—Susan Stevenson, Nicole Chulick, and Andrew Herrup—to Dhaka, underscore Washington’s utilitarian calculus.

On March 24-25, Lt. Gen. Joel P. Vowell, Deputy Commanding General of U.S. Army Pacific, visited Bangladesh, where he met with senior military officials to discuss bilateral defense cooperation.

For the United States, Bangladesh is reducible to a logistical node—an uninhabited chess square on which foreign powers move their pawns, indifferent to the collateral carnage.

Towhid Hossain’s admission that the entire Bangladesh-Myanmar border is “under the control of a non-state actor (the Arakan Army)” and that Bangladesh “cannot have formal contact” but “cannot remain isolated” is telling.

It reveals the labyrinthine peril Bangladesh faces: attempting humanitarian action without emboldening insurgent actors who are themselves complicit in human rights abuses.

Empowering the AA is not merely strategic folly; it is a moral abomination.

The AA, far from a neutral humanitarian force, is implicated in systemic atrocities against Rohingya Muslims—village burnings, extrajudicial executions, and acts of ethnic cleansing perpetrated in collusion with segments of Myanmar’s military.

Rohingya survivors in Cox’s Bazar recount AA fighters not as liberators but as executioners.

By facilitating AA logistics—fuel resupplies, satellite-enabled communications, and even the prospect of Turkish UAV support—Bangladesh would be abetting a force historically inimical to the very refugees it has striven so heroically to shelter.

Such complicity would irreparably tarnish Bangladesh’s moral standing and betray the trust of both its citizens and the world.

It was Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s indefatigable Prime Minister, who once ruefully mused that she might have retained power had she acquiesced to U.S. overtures for a military base on Saint Martin Island.

Then, as now, her words carry prophetic weight.

As the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific paradigm intensifies, Bangladesh finds itself courted by Western interlocutors offering security assistance and diplomatic plaudits in exchange for strategic utility.

Hasina’s admonition resonates with renewed clarity: engagements that seem transactional today can metamorphose into enduring dependencies tomorrow, undermining sovereignty even as they promise fleeting benefits.

Myanmar’s junta, galvanized by alliances with China and Russia forged in the crucible of Western sanctions, will brook no perceived betrayal.

Mechanized brigades and artillery units are massing along the Teknaf frontier; reconnaissance drones swarm the Naf’s skies.

A single munition-crossing by the AA will furnish the junta a casus belli to strike deep into Bangladeshi territory—transforming Cox’s Bazar’s tent cities into warzones and establishing buffer zones that cannibalize Bangladesh’s sovereign land.

.The Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), which has traditionally been configured for peacetime patrols, lacks the equipment and training needed for prolonged mechanized engagements.

Local defense installations, once used for Turkish field-gun calibrations and ATGM drills, will become perilous grounds for Bangladeshi soldiers unprepared for the tempest they invited.

History’s admonitions are explicit. In the 1980s, Pakistan—at Washington’s behest—fomented the Afghan mujahideen to eviscerate Soviet proxies.

The result was not triumphant liberation but decades of internecine terror that Pakistan could never fully expunge.

In Southeast Asia, host states that lent their soil to insurgent staging grounds found themselves ensnared in interminable conflicts.

Bangladesh’s architects of the Silkhali Corridor must grasp that proxy wars are inherently infectious, metastasizing beyond their ostensible boundaries and exacting a toll long after foreign sponsors have departed.

The economic ramifications of a southeastern insurgency would be nothing short of catastrophic.

Bangladesh’s garment sector—the linchpin of its 8% growth trajectory and principal source of foreign exchange—would collapse as shipping lanes through Chittagong and Mongla become combat zones.

Foreign direct investment would evaporate; credit ratings would plummet; the taka would spiral into unsustainable devaluation.

Simultaneously, the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) would face a grave security threat as the Arakan Army’s encroachment on indigenous lands—previously contained through delicate negotiations—would intensify, jeopardizing the safety and stability of the region’s indigenous communities.

Rhetoric sympathetic to the Arakan Army (AA) could rekindle long-standing grievances, potentially igniting new separatist flare-ups and fracturing national unity.

Ironically, the corridor conceived to assuage the Rohingya’s suffering may amplify their torment.

As hostilities emblazon Cox’s Bazar’s horizon, the camps will morph into killing fields.

Tens of thousands of refugees, already on the brink of collapse, will be forced to flee again, surging into uncharted territories or overcrowding urban fringes, their future uncertain and fraught with peril.

Overwhelmed healthcare facilities and decimated humanitarian supply chains will precipitate a second, even more lethal, humanitarian abyss—one that Bangladesh’s overstretched apparatus cannot fathom managing.

In seeking Western succor, Dhaka risks ostracism from its most consequential neighbors.

India, enmeshed in the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Project, and China, vested in the CMEC’s deep-sea port at Kyaukpyu, will interpret Bangladesh’s corridor complicity as strategic perfidy.

New Delhi could throttle bilateral trade, reorient its “Act East” corridor away from Bangladesh, and deepen cooperation with Myanmar to secure its own northeastern frontier.

Beijing might impose economic countermeasures, escalate military aid to Naypyidaw, or clandestinely support Bangladeshi opposition forces, leveraging its Belt and Road network to squeeze Dhaka’s fiscal vulnerabilities.

In courting Washington’s ephemeral favor, Bangladesh would find itself geopolitically isolated—bereft of genuine allies when the storm breaks.

Bangladesh stands at a pivotal moment, where its future hinges on whether it can shape its own destiny or fall prey to foreign manipulation.

The Silkhali Corridor holds the potential to be a lifeline, but only if Dhaka can separate it from the dangers of proxy warfare.

Otherwise, each convoy risks becoming a tool of conflict, every aid shipment a weapon for insurgents.

History will judge interim chief Dr. Muhammad Yunus—whether he will succumb to the allure of temporary foreign favor to maintain power or rise as a symbol of sovereign strength, protecting Bangladesh’s independence and resisting external control.