It was August 2017 when the world really started to take note of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. Descendants of Arab Muslims who speak a different language to most other people in Myanmar, the Rohingya had up to that point lived mainly in the northern Rakhine state, coexisting uneasily alongside the majority Buddhist population.
But the Rohingya were reviled by many as illegal immigrants and treated by the then government as stateless people. In 2017, when violence broke out in the north of the state, security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation” that forced more than 1 million Rohingya people to flee their homes and the country, actions that many onlookers saw as ethnic cleansing. Most Rohingya were driven into vast refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar region of Bangladesh, where they have remained ever since.
The Guardian global development reporter Kaamil Ahmed has been covering the Rohingya crisis for almost a decade, making multiple trips to the region. For this week’s Big Story, Kaamil returned to Cox’s Bazar where, in two moving reports, he details how disease and illness are widespread in the ramshackle camps, and how the desperation to escape has resulted in rich business for people traffickers.
And, with Myanmar now controlled by a military junta and introducing a deeply unpopular conscription drive (as Rebecca Ratcliffe and Aung Naing Soe report), the prospect of any Rohingya people being able to return home to Rakhine state remains as distant as it did in 2017.
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