Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

“Once upon a time there was a Buddhist King, who governed over the province of Sittwe, in the North of the Arakan kingdom”- tells an ancient legend that takes us back five centuries. “All of a sudden his land was invaded by a barbarian army. The desperate King then went to his Muslim friend Sovereign of Chittagong, which is a reign beyond the borders with Bengal, asking for help.

‘Please, lend me an army so that it can fight and re-conquer my throne,‘- he begged.”

“His request was granted and the King of Sittwe defeated the invaders and regained power over his land.

Filled with gratitude he asked those soldiers who had come to fight for him, to stay by his side, in his protection and in exchange each one would have received a piece of land.”

The army agreed and this is how the first Muslim presence appeared on Arakan territory, today one of the seven states that compile the present Union of Myanmar.  

The reality, which is certainly less romantic, hurls the whole story into more recent times. Precisely into the British colonial era when the English governed the part of Asia that includes present-day Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar (then Burma).

In those years all borders were removed. Migrations and deportations characterized an epoch of massive movement. Hundreds of different ethnic groups, who since immemorial times fought, united and ignored each other, creating a complex interlacement between tribes, were now forcedly reunited under the name of one single domination: the English crown.

Before leaving, in the middle of the twentieth century, European colonies traced out new maps and drew new borders marked by compasses and rulers rather than by a careful analyses of the complex tribal interlacement. Suddenly who came from “over there” found him self stuck “over here”; and the ones from “over here” began to be persecuted by the inhabitants of “over there”. The Rohingya are among those that found them selves in the wrong place at the wrong time and now, after half a century, they still are a people without a land, victims of both the ones “over here” and those of “over there”.

Rohingya is a term applied to the children of those soldiers who came to save the King in the legend or, more simply, the product of small migrations beyond borders that before didn’t exist.

A name given to an ethnic group that finds it self unwanted in the country it was born  and unwelcome in the country from which it descends. Geographically speaking they are hated in Myanmar and unaccepted in Bangladesh. The result is Muslim community who lives in a Buddhist country  that today counts over 30.000 refugees forced to live in the erected camps on the Bengali side of the border. People forced to hide, unable to make any right count, from the one of getting married to the one of moving freely.

My encounter with them took place on both sides of the border. I first visited their community in Sittwe, in Myanmar, then I took a series of airplanes, trains and busses that brought me to Bangladesh, in the Cox’s Bazar area, where today they live as refugees. The difference between the life style of the ones stuck “over here” and the ones escaped “over there” is almost imperceptible: humiliated, persecuted and tortured on one side; overpopulated, impotent, useless on the other.

In former Burma a young Muslim volunteer worker pointed out, as we where sliding down the road on a squeaky cyclo-taxi , the vast fields now completely deserted and un-cropped. Fields that have been confiscated in the years from the “Calà” farmers:

“That’s how they call us, Calà. It means illegal immigrant, he who has come recently. They call us that with disgust”.

A bit down the road we pass in front of a stunning and colossal white stone Mosque –

“You see this mosque? It was built almost two hundred years ago, how can they say that we come recently?”

That land was taken from them violently. Then it was abandoned.

Even their cemeteries where subtracted from them and now the burying takes place in shrinking pieces of land surrounding the mosques which are overpopulated with cadavers.

Our young guide tells us about the physical tortures undergone by the government’s soldiers and of psychological ones inflicted by the Arakaneese (the "original" Buddhists inhabitants of the Arakan State).

“If we go to the hospital we must pay more, if we go to school must pay more. And speaking of school” - he adds - “we are not allowed to study English neither to confer in medicine or engineering degrees”. The government forbids them anything that can lead to a prestigious title or to a high-rank profession.

“This is also our land and all we ask for is to live in it in peace”. This phrase pronounced with a subdual voice, is the phrase that later in time I would have heard and reheard out of the mouths of hundreds of other men and women: “All we ask for is to live in peace”.

Barely one hundred kilometers North of Sittwe, yet an inaccessible route for a western person, scours the line of the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh. An invisible line that offers hardly anything, in whom all those who have crossed it have found further poverty and evil treatment, scarcity and injustice. A great number of these desperate souls have been captured by the invisible claws and swallowed in the stomach of Tal.

Tal is an inhuman pile of devastation. Immediately following a massive Bengali army roadblock, driving south along the road that connects the town of Cox' s Bazaar with the border district of Teknaf, on the left appear the first shacks. The ceilings are made out of large black plastic tarps, which are tied onto bamboo branches that are impaled into the ground. Potato bags wrapped around the stilts make the walls.

The first shack is followed by the second then the third and the fourth, until it all turns into a continuous amalgam of wood and plastic, mud and garbage, that grows on the side of the road, continuously, for one kilometer. As the car drives it is impossible to stop staring at such a site.

The desire of being anywhere but in front of an inhabited place, more then all inhabited by human beings, naturally arises.

Instead that’s what it is. Tal is a refugee camp that holds over 10.000 people who are camped, curled up, Ill, crowded, despaired, hot, hungry and thirsty.

The first interview is to a man who lives in the skeleton of a hut because he can’t afford to buy the plastic tarp for the external walling: ” Why are you here?”

“Because the Myanmar government confiscated my land, arrested me, tortured me and obliged me to forced labor” –

Why have they confiscated your land?

“Because I’m Muslim, a Rohingya, I’m considered an immigrant” –

An immigrant? How many generations before you have lived in Arakan State?

“I don’t know precisely but one thing is certain: the father of my grandfather was born in Burma”.

Suddenly the yelling of a woman interrupts us. Her eyes look possessed, she cries without tears. As she comes strait towards us she screams while our interpreter tries to decipher and then translate.

“Yesterday my little girl died! She got run over by a truck! Do something, why are you standing there without doing anything?”

She had gone mad.

Her eleven-year-old girl is one of the endless victims that each year loses their life under the wheels of a car. The roads in Bangladesh are narrow. Bus, truck and car drivers rarely have a driver’s license and the speed limits are inexistent. The rule that is “enforced” is “the one of the mightiest”. When passing another vehicle, even if it’s the bus to be in the wrong incoming lane, it is up to the car, scooter or bicycle (in the right lane) to head into the ditch in order to avoid the crash. On the roads in Bangladesh slowing down is substituted by the honking of the horn and the children who are often distracted by their games, don’t have the time to decipher the lethal sound. Tal is camped out on the side of one of these roads.

We try to enter one of the huts. A bearded man with his face skin glued to the bones, sitting outside, invites us in. His opaque look is lost towards a nonexistent horizon. Two of us sit down inside while the man remains at the door. We go through a series of adjustments in order to squeeze in there, our bodies touch, it’s crowded. Our space is also shared with two pots, three scorched logs and two bricks on which one of the pots rests. Opening one's arms in each direction the fingers touch the walls. Moreover, although sitting, we must bend down in order to avoid banging our heads on the ceiling (made of plastic). The house measures two meters by two.

How many people live in here?

“Four”.

In a slightly bigger hut, just a few meters down the muddy isle, lives a family of seven.

“No air come through these shacks” – laments a woman - “rainwater instead gashes in!”

Today it hasn’t rained and the thermometer marked thirty-five degrees under a scorching sun. The flooring inside the habitations is the same as the one outside. It is made of dirt, which during the six months of monsoons becomes first mud and then torrent.

Why are you here? - The usual and only question used ahead of all others.

“My son got married secretly and when the military government found out we all escaped to Bangladesh before they could arrest us” 

Why did he have to marry secretly?

“The Muslims need a permit to get married and this costs too much money, it is hard to be able to afford it”.

The Rohingya also need a permit to move from one small town to the other.

“To go visit my family I must ask the government for a permit and pay a lot of money under the counter”.

The reason behind these permits is very simple, the Rohingya have no nationality, no documents, no identity. They used to have them, but all these rights were taken away.

In 1991 the government of self-proclaimed dictator Ne Win, among other sanguinary “reforms”, started a violent campaign against these undesirable Muslims, forcing them to return their identity papers.

That event caused the first refugee wave of 250.877 people who crossed the frontier. Once deprived of their documents, the Rohingya and all the their properties became the swift booty and property of government and local population. The former arrests them, obliges them to forced labor and confiscates their houses and lands, while the latter humiliate them, don’t offer them jobs and prevent them from the access to the already very poor healthcare and education.

Excrement stench is omnipresent in Tal. Putrid everywhere, shit, diarrhea, slush, rotten. A shocking sight but above all a stinging smell.

A woman unwraps from a shawl a creature made of bones and covered by a thin layer of skin, a little boy or perhaps a girl. Two-years-old, it looked like it was born just a few weeks ago. The fact that it was alive was demonstrated only by it’s lazy attempt of keeping it’s ill, extinguished eyes open. Just like every other person met in the camp: ill, malnourished and dazed. Only a small MSF team (Doctors Without Borders) operative from a clinic/hut built on the opposite bank of the road intervenes in the attempt of saving lives.

“Tal, in all truth, is not really a refugee camp” - explains Jim Worrol, Executive Manager for UNHCR (United Nations High Commetee for Refugees) in Cox' s Bazaar -

“It was never recognized as such by the Bengali government and therefore UNHCR hasn’t been able to intervene”.

Now finally, at a distance of years, these people will be transferred.

Islamic Relief (a Non Governmental Organization founded in England in 1984) will take the reins of a new refugee camp project, which is still under construction, guiding the relocation operations within the end of the year. In result the official refugee camps will become three, adding on to the already existing Kutupalong Refugee Camp and Nayapara Refugee Camp which were founded by UNHCR and contain a total of 2.956 families.

In 1994 a three headed commission formed by the two involved governments mediated by UNHCR emitted the sentence of repatriating the refugees. Bangladesh was no longer considering them as such.

236.599 people, at the time spread in 20 welcome camps, were re-transferred across the border and re-placed in the hands of the Burmese military regime. Nevertheless the fugitive flow, from then until now, continues imperturbably in its escape in the reverse direction. The Bengali government looks like it has surrendered in its long time clearance struggle. The last deportation happened in 2005 when only ninety-two people where repatriated. Since then on the RRRC’s (Refugee Relief Repatriation Commissioner) graphics next to the voice “repatriated this year” appears the inscription NIL.  

Hope for the Rohingya resides where hope resides for every other Burmese: Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, peace and end of the military ruling are the only words that recur, for years, uselessly and without truce.