These Are the Stories I've Grown up with All My Life: The Rohingya Refugees of Bangladesh

Food distribution at the Kutupalong-Balukhali settlements. Photo by J. Malcolm Garcia.

My translator, Ousman, tells me he has worked with many journalists—TV, radio, print—and they all had specific requests. Get me this, this, and this person, they'd tell him. People suitable for stories they'd mapped out in their heads.

"Who do you want?" he asks me.

I've told him repeatedly that I don't work that way. I want to spend a few weeks in the Kutupalong-Balukhali settlements, a refugee camp for Rohingya people fleeing Myanmar in Bangladesh. I want to hang out and let whomever I meet be my guides. Ousman, however, remains adamant. We should develop a detailed plan, sir, he maintains, as if without one his sense of himself as a translator and fixer would be betrayed. He does not just interpret, he arranges interviews. So, despite my objections, he shows me a piece of paper detailing how he has structured my days.

"Here are the people I've asked to speak to you," he says, a hand on one knee, his face leaning into mine, scowling with seriousness, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He reads:

A pregnant woman.

Schoolchildren.

A woman who just had a baby.

A raped woman.

"What do you think?"

Before I can answer, he raises a hand and goes on with what I presume is his idea of an orientation.

"Rohingya have two kinds of memory here, sir. Good memories and violence memories. The good memories are very distant. They are a like an animal facing extinction. Only a few remain. I was just two years old when my family left Rohingya State in Myanmar. I don't remember that time but I know the history. I know why we came."

That bitter history remains ongoing between the Muslim minority Rohingya and the Buddhist majority of Myanmar. Myanmar's military claims it is not responsible for the recent exodus of Rohingya into Bangladesh. It accuses Rohingya militants, who attacked a police outpost on August 25, 2017, for the unrest, asserting that the Buddhist-dominated military targets only insurgents. Human rights groups, however, contend that the military and the hardline, monk-led Buddhist nationalist group known as Ma Ba Tha––the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion––used the attack as a reason to annihilate Rohingya communities.

More than half a million Rohingya entered Bangladesh between August and the end of December 2017. By the time of my trip in January 2018, human rights investigators estimated that more than a thousand civilians had died in Rakhine, a state in Myanmar on the west coast where the Rohingya live, and possibly as many as five thousand.

Ousman's family fled Myanmar in 1992, long before the current crisis when more than 250,000 Rohingya refugees ran away from forced labor camps at the hands of the Burmese army. With the assistance of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and non-governmental relief agencies, the Bangladeshi government sheltered the refugees in nineteen camps near Cox's Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh. Ousman's family landed in Kutupalong camp.

Ousman remembers his mother telling him about the night the military came to their house, arrested his father and hauled him to a labor camp. Ahmad! a soldier called, and when Ousman's father answered the door, they grabbed him. Ousman's mother went to the village administrator, a Rohingya, and demanded he advocate

A graveyard at the Kutupalong-Balukhali settlements. Photo by J. Malcolm Garcia.

for Ahmad, but he refused. If I do what you ask, they will kill me too, he told her. They'll ask me, Do you want to be free or work in the camp? This man had no power. He just followed orders.

Like others in the labor camp, Ousman's father split stones for ten to fifteen hours a day without pay, without a break. When people...