Kaamil Ahmed, author, I Feel No Peace – “The future for Rohingya children seems bleak” - Hindustan Times
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Kaamil Ahmed, author, I Feel No Peace – “The future for Rohingya children seems bleak”

ByMajid Maqbool
May 20, 2023 12:41 AM IST

Some 700,000 Rohingya people were displaced from their homes following Mayanmar’s military operation in August 2017. Now, they live an uncertain life in refugee camps. Kaamil Ahmed explores the disrupted lives of Rohingya refugees

What drew you to write this book about the plight of Rohingya people in exile and how is this narrative different from other non-fiction books on Rohingyas in refugee camps?

Author Kaamil Ahmed. (Photo RGB)
Author Kaamil Ahmed. (Photo RGB)

When I started my career as a journalist covering South Asia, there would be very regular reports of boats capsizing in the Bay of Bengal, with many of the passengers dying before they could be saved. Most passengers were Rohingya and so, it seemed, no one cared much to look too deeply into why so many were dying at sea. There was a whole transnational trafficking network flourishing off the Rohingya’s suffering but their deaths were reported so trivially, just as the rest of their story was, whether it was the violence they faced in Myanmar or those boats being pushed back to sea by countries stretching from Bangladesh to Malaysia. It did not sit right with me to see such an important issue go ignored and so understanding what was happening to the Rohingya as a people became something I was eager to work on as soon as I started my career. 

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The first real step to writing the book came in 2015, when Thailand discovered mass graves along the trafficking route those boats had served and I headed down to the refugee camps in Bangladesh. There, I learnt about the conditions the Rohingya fled and how so many of them had lived, for decades, without hope. It was meeting Rohingya who had grown up in Bangladesh since their parents fled Myanmar in the early 1990s that made me want to understand more about what they face abroad and that’s what I think is different to most other writing about the Rohingya. The focus is usually on the genocidal violence they face in Myanmar but I felt there was also a story that needed to be told about what they continue to face elsewhere and how, when they go searching for safety, they instead find themselves falling into the hands of people who seem to want to exploit them for profit. 

Was it difficult to gain the trust of Rohingya people in refugee camps in Bangladesh? How were you able to make them open up about their ordeal about which you’ve written in detail in this book?

It was not particularly difficult for me because I had been reporting from the camps in Bangladesh before most of the other journalists and so I had reliable contacts whose trust I had earned and who were willing to vouch for me. This helped when I got into sensitive topics, such as drug trafficking or violence from authorities. I gave people time. I didn’t rush interviews and push for angles I had already decided but let the interviews flow and simply listened. I tried to keep my questions limited and very open, so that whoever I was talking to could decide what they wanted to tell me. 

As a reporter, I try to stick with a story for a long time to see where it goes and keep in touch with the people who matter. I don’t like writing an article and then moving on. This meant I was in regular contact with many of the people I interviewed and the trust that built meant they would often come to me with information. Even those I could not keep in contact with while away from the camps I would visit regularly whenever I returned and I think that played a major role in them trusting me. 

You write that UN workers and aid agencies often turned a blind eye to the plight of Rohingya people in Myanmar and Bangladesh refugee camps. In what ways have international NGOs and world bodies like the UN failed to protect the Rohingya refugees over the years? 

They were, of course, vital in helping to save Rohingya lives in 2017 by giving them food, somewhere to shelter and crucial medical care. But humanitarians are responsible for more than that. They also should be protecting the refugees and I think history shows they have sometimes failed in that. The coerced returns of Rohingya from Bangladesh to Myanmar in 1978 and the 1990s happened under the UN’s eyes but without it opening its mouth. It seems like the UN is often scared to criticise the governments it works with in order to continue its operations but what the Rohingya faced on their return was genocide. Each time the Rohingya were returned to Myanmar, they ended up coming to Bangladesh again in larger numbers. Reading this history and hearing about it from the Rohingya who have been in Bangladesh for decades is very disheartening. Humanitarians have often been unable to deliver the basics in terms of education or protection. 

The bigger problem is probably not the UN agencies and humanitarians, who simply help Rohingya survive in the absence of a real solution; it is those who are happy for the Rohingya’s problems to remain. There has never been any momentum on granting the Rohingya real safety in Myanmar and again now we see little progress towards a solution for them. It seems the world is happy for the Rohingya to remain in Bangladeshi refugee camps. 

How have the lives of Rohingya children been affected in the refugee camps? You point out that when it came to educating Rohingya, the authorities in Bangladesh “actively sabotaged any attempts to build a self-sufficient generation within the camps.” Why?

The future for Rohingya children seems bleak. Their homeland does not look like it will be safe for them any time soon. There needs to be radical change in Myanmar for that to happen. If they are returned to Myanmar in anything like the current conditions, they’re at risk of facing the same violence again. So they’re left in refugee camps where they’re unable to move freely, unable to get an education, and unable to work when they grow up. There’s not just a lack of opportunity but also a lack of hope.

Since the 1990s, the Rohingya have tried to circumvent this by at least plugging the education gap – those with some education would pass it on to the next generation through educational centres that they set up themselves. But the camp authorities have always made running these centres difficult and often close them down. Perhaps it is simply because Bangladesh does not want an education system outside of its control but it still does not provide a real alternative. Many believe it’s because Bangladesh does not want the Rohingya to be comfortable - it doesn’t want the camps to be a place where the Rohingya can be settled and remain for decades more. It also does not want the Rohingya to assimilate and be able to pass as Bangladeshis, which it believes would increase its burden.

The good sign, however, is that Bangladesh has allowed a limited rollout of education to older children based on the Myanmar curriculum, though from what I’ve heard it is still a long way off reaching most children. 

272pp, $29.95; Hurst (Amazon)
272pp, $29.95; Hurst (Amazon)

How have human trafficking industries and criminal gangs exploited the plight of Rohingyas in refugee camps, forcing many of these stateless people to set out on perilous journeys to places like Malaysia where they’re exploited after being separated from their families.

Wherever the Rohingya go, there’s someone trying to take advantage of them. There’s only so long someone can remain in a refugee camp where they’re deprived of all opportunity before they go looking for something better. At the most basic level, this could be some money to help care for their families. In a place where they’re not allowed to work properly, many end up in debt and cash can be very useful, so gangs, especially those involved in smuggling the narcotic yaba, approach Rohingya to take on the risk of carrying the drugs for them. The Rohingya role is often played up to demonise them as the ones bringing drugs into Bangladesh, but really they’re just taking the risk away from the criminals in Myanmar and Bangladesh. In one case I covered in I Feel No Peace, a woman ended up in debt because her husband had travelled to Malaysia but then abandoned her. She was then approached by a shopkeeper to carry the yaba between his shop and the main Cox’s Bazar town. The route is full of checkpoints and he wanted someone else to carry it so that they would be arrested instead of him if caught. 

The other major problem is the trafficking networks. They know they can entice Rohingya, especially young men, into trips abroad by promising them a better life with more freedom and opportunity. In a few cases, this might mean India but only a very small number head in that direction. Most want to go to Malaysia, which has been a destination for Rohingya for some time now. But the journey is dangerous and the traffickers take advantage of that to change the terms once the journey is underway. While they promise them that the journey won’t cost much, they’ll often end up holding them in a remote location and demanding ransoms from their families. This happened several times to Zia, a Rohingya man who features throughout the book, but also many others I spoke to. These stories were so common that most I learnt of did not even make it into the book. 

Traffickers also take advantage of single mothers quite often. They’ll promise to take them or their children to work as domestic workers in the homes of Bangladeshis, claiming it will only be for a short period, but then refuse to allow the children to return to the camps or let their mothers visit them. 

You also criticize Bangladesh authorities on how they’ve dealt with the Rohingya refugees living in the camps. How did the anti-refugee rhetoric in Bangladesh, which was also fueled by the country’s media, come to affect thousands of Rohingya people living in the refugee camps?

Bangladesh, in many ways, has a very difficult job. There are a lot of Rohingya in Bangladesh and it has had very little help from outside. The aid is drying up and no one else has offered to take in Rohingya. But in the meantime it has made life for the Rohingya much more difficult with restrictions on education and work and by fencing in the camps so they cannot move beyond them. It has also moved tens of thousands to Bhasan Char, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal that could easily end up being in the path of cyclones. 

After the massacres the Rohingya fled in 2017, there was a lot of sympathy in Bangladesh for them but that has been eroded by the rhetoric since, which has painted them as ungrateful for not wanting to move to Bhasan Char. They’ve also been demonised as somehow responsible for drugs and crime, despite only really being used as cogs in a system run by others. 

To some extent, the negative perceptions are fuelled by local actors who benefit from keeping the Rohingya down, the same people who benefit from their vulnerability and are able to influence the local media, whose stories then filter through to the national press. 

For a period, the local police chief was praised for his so-called anti-drug activities, which involved lots of extrajudicial killings, including of many Rohingya, but when he ended up killing a former military man whose family were well-linked, he lost his job and he was exposed as being corrupt and amassing wealth while in his position. It was an example of someone who had thrown other people under the bus, even killing them, to cover up his own dirt. 

What were the stories that speak about the resilience of the Rohingya despite the persecution and losses they have suffered over the years?

There are so many stories of resilience. It can feel quite bleak going through this material but the resilience is where the hope is. I met Nobi, who is the Rohingya I’ve known the longest and been closest to, in May 2015 during the boat crisis. He has fought through so much. He grew up in Bangladesh and has had to struggle for everything, including getting an education. Since then, he has made sure to teach others and has produced probably hundreds of students despite only being in his mid-30s himself. He has set up football teams and organises charity for his fellow refugees. He’s had setbacks – being threatened by authorities and losing his home in a fire a couple of years ago – but he always gets back to teaching and fighting for his students. 

Another fighter was Sharifah Shakira in Malaysia. After violence in Myanmar, she was taken to Malaysia very young and went through a traumatic journey including being separated from her mother. But like Nobi, she taught herself and through that process, learned how to teach others. But these figures who start off teaching seem to become so much more – they are advocates and social workers for their people. 

Resilience really is everywhere in the Rohingya diaspora. There are people fighting to rebuild their lives over the most traumatic experiences you can imagine, people fighting to keep their community’s education and to keep their language, culture and traditions alive when that is exactly what the Myanmar state has tried to wipe out. 

Majid Maqbool is an independent journalist based in Kashmir.

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