Abstract
In August 2017, as the global media was awash with images of desperate Rohingyas fleeing a deadly crackdown by Myanmar’s army, Bangladesh saw its borders flooded with thousands of refugees. It was also internationally recognised for its humanitarian concern in swiftly setting up refugee camps, mainly in the Cox’s Bazar district near the Bangladesh–Myanmar border. I have been documenting the Rohingya crisis for over a decade. In addition to routinely covering the several refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, which accommodated more than a million Rohingya refugees, I have also worked in Burma, Bangladesh, Thailand and England to cover the Rohingya story.
Note that the political construct of the 2017 genocide as a one-time incident is problematic. Rohingyas were being persecuted for almost four decades before 2017, and the persecution continues half a decade later. The UN system, the international human rights organisations, Western powers and the global media have failed to play a meaningful role in stopping this crisis. The slow-burning genocide of the Rohingyas remains the biggest genocide to date.
While more than a million Rohingya refugees continue to live in Bangladesh and almost another million are spread worldwide, more than half a million Rohingyas still live in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. These Rohingyas feel that they remain exposed to further persecution. One could also argue that the Rohingya issue has become not just a refugee crisis but also a security crisis for the region. An Islamist extremists group called Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) had appeared on the scene in 2016 and played a triggering role in the beginning of the 2017 military operation. ARSA had attacked the military check post before the military operation of 25 August 2017. ARSA to date continues to use the term ‘jihadi’ when they claim to fight the Burmese oppressors.
The human rights situation for the Rohingyas in Myanmar remains very dire, even though the global media, especially the Western media, has now dropped them off its radar. There has been no reasonable progress towards the repatriation of these refugees. However, those who found their way to more prosperous countries, such as Malaysia and the United Kingdom, feel their lives hedged from immediate threats. My photo essay documents those rare individuals who managed to bring a happy end to their treacherous ordeal of being persecuted, having to flee, being trafficked and being attacked during the journey. But for every happy story, there are dozens of counterfactuals where families lost their breadwinners, wives lost husbands and children lost guardians. Within the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, refugees are forced to live in difficult situations, deprived of clean water, primary education and medical services. The violence within the camps especially leaves women, and children exposed to dangerous predators, and the centres are rife with domestic violence.
Although taking up paid employment in Bangladesh is legally forbidden for the Rohingyas, the men still find work, especially the arduous and hazardous jobs that Bangladeshi citizens look down on. Ironically, the Cox’s Bazar district boasts of higher productivity in aggregate terms, especially in fishing and related industries, thus invoking the coercive logic of predatory capitalism.
During my decade-long experience of photographing the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia and the United Kingdom—and of course Myanmar—I have witnessed how individual Rohingyas and their small communities had risked their lives to turn up on the Bangladeshi shores on rickety boats or let themselves be trafficked across the land border. Five years after the significant showdown, they remain hopeful about a specific ‘qaum’ (nation) sensibility. Even then, the memory of persecution can be somewhat distant for many Rohingyas, especially the younger members of the community. Many find themselves weighed under livelihood concerns even if there have been fleeting moments of individual achievement and joy, such as passing exams and finding jobs, falling in love and parenthood. Several Rohingyas I met have expressed their gratitude towards Bangladesh for giving them a secure space to live and for their identity as Rohingya Muslims. There are aspirations of social emulation whereby many refugees embark on treacherous and risky journeys away from Bangladesh, towards East Asia and Europe, seeking better livelihoods and family reunions.
The photographs presented here are meant to recap their journeys as refugees and show how they seek to document their daily lives in various refugee camps. While the Rohingya crisis began several decades before the world took notice of it, the impact that the more recent genocide had on them is profound and unfathomable. It is even more regrettable that the issue remains a conundrum half a decade after the 2017 genocide. While repatriation has not been realised in any meaningful way, the Rohingya refugees have been subjected to unimaginable violence and injustice, both individually and collectively.
A country that came into being as recently as 1971, many Bangladeshis recall their arduous struggle for a nation-state. Many sympathise with the Rohingyas, drawing parallels with their families’ ordeals as refugees when they had fought (and won) a secessionist revolution against Pakistan. However, while they continue to empathise with the cause of the Rohingyas, they have come to realise over time that the Rohingya issue is not likely to be resolved any time soon.
Several of the photographs in this essay were taken in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar between 2012 and 2019. However, two occasional photos from Malaysia are included with a wish to connect the dots on the onward journeys undertaken by the Rohingya refugees beyond Bangladesh and also to offer a more in-depth view on the everyday lives of Rohingya refugees beyond journalistic clicks feeding media frenzy.
An eight-year-old Rohingya girl crosses the border fence between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Her family no longer felt safe in Burma after her aunt had been gang-raped by the Burmese security forces three days before this photo was taken, on 19 March 2014. She and 11 members of her family fled to an unregistered refugee camp in Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Following a sectarian clash between the Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists in June 2012, a state of emergency was declared in Rakhine. It was estimated that there were 88 casualties while 90,000 people had been displaced. Thousands of Rohingyas sought safety in Bangladesh during this period even if Bangladesh refused to allow the Rohingya to take refuge. The Bangladeshi Border Guards pushed the boats carrying Rohingya refugees back towards Myanmar.
In mid-June 2012, 137 Rohingyas were caught by Bangladeshi border guards as they attempted to enter Bangladeshi waters in the darkness of the night. They were forced back into the sea even as their boats began to break after the arduous journey. Within hours, 132 of them disappeared in the wide-open ocean. To date, nobody knows what happened to them.
Many Rohingya children are born and brought up in refugee camps in Bangladesh as stateless refugees. When this girl was asked about life in the centre, she replied, ‘This camp is my only home, this is where I belong, and I love this place. I do not know why the older people complain but I do not have any problem living here.’ This photo was taken on 15 March 2009 in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
This boy was born in a Rohingya refugee camp in Malaysia and is obviously stateless. He is in a state of suspension, literally and metaphorically. While it is shared cultural practice among the South and East Asian communities to let the baby rest in a makeshift cloth hammock, the irony of the situation here is that it reminds us of the ordeal of a million Rohingya refugees worldwide living in the state of uncertainty and statelessness. This photo was taken on 7 May 2011 in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Even though there are underlying issues of being a refugee, a cursory photo like this one shows that everyday life is expected in a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. This one is one of the smaller camps. This photo was taken on 17 March 2009.
The only educational facilities Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh had until very recently were those offering Islamic education. It was common for the parents to send their children, especially boys, to the nearby Madrassas. While the situation is now changing for the better, the presence of Islamist extremists within the Rohingya camps poses further problems for the refugees and the state. This photo was taken on 6 December 2017 in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
Like education, water is another pressing concern for refugees living in Cox Bazar, Bangladesh. The camps lack a drainage system which means that the walkways turn into small streams during the monsoon. When it rains too much, the landslide risks as the hillsides have been deforested for firewood. Landslides may engulf the homes of the refugees thus doubling the burdens of homelessness.
While water threatens to sweep away their homes, there remains a severe shortage of drinking water in several Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar. A man digs a well in the Nayapara camp. This is a government-run camp that accepts only the registered Rohingya refugees. Since there is no piped water, gallons of drinking water are distributed by camp authorities twice a day. But that is not sufficient for the 65,000 or so refugees who live here. A refugee is building a well as an alternate source even if he will have to dig very deep to reach the freshwater. The photograph speaks about the situation before 2017, and now things are relatively better.
Refugees are not allowed to work, but many Rohingyas do informally join the local workforce, which then sparks tension with the local population. In this picture, a Rohingya worker repairs some leakage in the water reservoir in an ice factory in Cox’s Bazar. The water is sprinkled in to be frozen like ice.
Several unregistered Rohingya refugees have taken up work as fishermen in Cox’s Bazar. Economic analyses show that the Rohingyas joining the workforce has significantly increased the productivity in the fishing industry. The refugees often agree to venture out into the rough sea during the dangerous seasons that the Bangladeshi locals would not go. This reminds us of the coercive logic of predatory capitalism here in Cox’s Bazar as anywhere else.
This photo is a stark reminder of the role of photojournalism in extreme situations such as fleeing from persecution. Anwara Khatun (pseudonym) wanted me to take this photograph because she believed this was possibly the only chance she had in seeking justice for her and her deceased mother. What she is holding in her hand is the picture of her stepfather who tried to rape her three times. Her mother saved her on each of these three occasions. Her stepfather attacked the mother in a fit of rage, leaving her alone to fend for herself. When I took this photo on 14 March 2009, a police case had been filed against him, but he had still not been arrested.
This photograph was taken on 19 May 2014, a day before Yunus left his wife in Bangladesh and allowed himself to be trafficked to Malaysia, where he believed his life would be better. His wife was nine months pregnant. A week later, the news came that his boat had capsized in the rough sea and that everybody on board had died. Not long after, Yunus’ wife gave birth to their second son.
Anwar asked me to photograph him and his family almost to memorialise the personal odyssey he was embarking on the next day. Along with several other aspirant young Rohingyas, he took a boat the next day, heading to Malaysia. This frolicking on the sea was meant to be a farewell to his family including young children before he may achieve his aspirations in a new life in Malaysia. The next day, Anwar left. But his whereabouts remained unknown when I followed up on him almost two years after clicking this photo. His family and friends had not received any news from him.
This is among the very few photos I could click, which had a happy ending. The young couple had seen each other before the ethnic riots in the Rakhine state in Myanmar turned them homeless. When an opportunity arose, Ahsan (pseudonym) fled to Malaysia and built himself a base. After a while, they tried to reunite while knowing that his girlfriend would also have to be smuggled to Malaysia, and that, as a woman, her ordeal would be even more treacherous than his. They are now together and they looked happy. When I asked them if there were any issues during her journey to Malaysia, there was a deep moment of silence which said so much more than words could ever describe.
This is a desolate photo I clicked in a Malaysian refugee camp on 10 May 2011. While I could not find many details on his social circumstances, this man had had a fall some time back, and he had not recovered. He was howling with hurt and helplessness, his body almost thrown onto the wall in a fit of pain. This is a stark reminder that a million Rohingya refugees continue to seek a home and some dignity weighed under the atrocities of state persecution.
