A Feeling of Having No Future
Dan Sullivan is the Director of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East at Refugees International. On a recent podcast episode, he discussed the challenges faced by the Rohingya community in Myanmar. Sullivan describes the complex dynamics involving the Rohingya, Rakhine, and Bamar populations. He highlights the Rohingya's struggles due to their Muslim faith, contentious citizenship status, and the role of the Burmese military. Sullivan notes that despite some improvements, there's a prevailing sense of despair and hopelessness among the Rohingya. Many attempt perilous sea journeys seeking better lives, often at their own peril. Sullivan notes the Rohingya's hope in the National Unity Government (NUG) and its more empathetic stance, but the path to repatriation remains uncertain. The focus is on international pressure, sanctions, and supporting the opposition.
“In talking to health workers who focus on mental trauma, what they were seeing was the immediate trauma of what people had seen in fleeing and being attacked, shifting now to this more long-term trauma of a sense of having no future.”
“It's been well documented and recognized, but I think it is worth just taking a moment to just recognize the extent of the violence that happened. I was in the camps a couple of weeks after that exodus started and just saw the people streaming across, and I remember talking to people, and it was just kind of eerie. A sense of the consistency in the stories that you would hear from different people about soldiers surrounding villages, setting them on fire, shooting at people as they fled, shooting them in the back. And this was just so widespread that if you ended up having over 700,000 people fleeing across to Bangladesh, and it wasn't recognized right away as genocide. That's something that Refugees International and other groups, we led a campaign in the United States called "Call it Genocide," where we worked with legal and human rights experts to send letters, have petitions signed, and held various events with celebrities and things like that to try to keep up the pressure, first on the Trump administration, and then on the Biden administration, and some of the people who went into the Biden administration had signed those petitions, people like Samantha Power. It continued to take a big push. So we're really glad that finally, the United States did recognize for what it is, for what was documented by the UN fact-finding mission that looked into this and by several other groups. And the struggle continues to address accountability and other aspects of this.
I've been visiting the camps from before, from right after, and then over the last five years at different times. And seeing the progression in talking to Rohingya refugees, some of the same ones, some others, and humanitarians working with them. What you've really seen is that there was a real emergency at the beginning, really rough conditions and difficulties with coordination. Five years later, a lot of that's been addressed in terms of coordination, on the surface. There had been huge deforestation because people were taking whatever they could to burn fires, but there's been replanting and greening of the camps. On the rooftops, there are gardens, and they're using liquid gas and different things so that things can be revived. The roads have been reinforced, with drainage, so you still have damage from the rains, but there's a little bit better ability for aid to continue to get in. So you've seen that on the surface.
But what you see underneath when you talk to the Rohingya refugees is there really is this growing sense of despair and hopelessness. In talking to health workers who focus on mental trauma, what they were seeing was the immediate trauma of what people had seen in fleeing and being attacked, shifting now to this more long-term trauma of a sense of having no future. They don't see how they can go back, especially since the coup by the military. They also see restrictions increasing within the camps in Bangladesh, where they have not had access to quality education or any education for a while. It was just the local communities that were trying to provide education, or access to livelihood opportunity. So there's a real sense of not having a future.
The other major thing that has changed is the insecurity in the camps has really increased, especially over the past year. There's a murky network of different groups. There's the group ARSA, which is a Rohingya militant extremist group. There are rival factions, and there are criminal elements. There has been a corridor for drug trade since well before the Rohingya were there. We're seeing more and more local Rohingya camp leaders attacked and killed over the past year, and also prominent civil society leaders. So there's a real tamping down on the ability for them to speak out and growing fear that adds to that sense of hopelessness.”