February 12, 2018
By Phatarawadee Phataranawik
The Nation
The millions of people who have fled Myanmar and Syria in
fear of violence are the subjects of a poignant and powerful photo exhibition
in Bangkok
Displayed on the curving walls on the third to fifth
floors are 77 images of people dislocated from their lives and homes in Syria,
Bangladesh, Cambodia and other places, forced to cross borders into foreign
lands and eke out dire existences in temporary camps that all too often become
permanent.
The images are the work of seven photojournalists of
various nationalities, who bear witness to unfolding tragedies in a world
increasingly given to nationalism and wary of foreigners.
“The touring exhibition aims to raises awareness about
the current crises involving refugees around the globe,” says curator Patrice
Vallette.
“We hope these powerful images will speak loudly about
this serious humanitarian issue.”
Conflict and persecution have forcibly displaced more
than 65 million people around the world, it’s noted in the exhibition, and
nearly half of them are children.
“The tragedy touching Syria now is reminiscent of refugee
crises of the past, such as in Cambodia in the 1970s and more recently in
Myanmar,” Vallette says.
Canadian Greg Constantine and Thailand’s Suthep
Kritsanavarin focused on the calamity of the Muslim Rohingya, producing
anguished black-and-white photos of the “nowhere people” being treated as
beings less than human.
Constantine captured the waves of Rohingya refugees
feeling from Myanmar into Bangladesh last year, a massive volume of people
forced into lives of desperation in jam-packed camps.
They are unsure if or when they will be able to return
home, and even should the invitation come, they are fearful of returning to the
threat of torture, rape and death at the hands of the Myanmar military and
anti-Muslim vigilante groups.
“My years of photographing the Rohingya [since 2006],”
Constantine says in the show’s catalogue, “Still represent only a small window
and a slice of time within decades of similar abuse.
“With nearly 75 per cent of the Rohingya community pushed
out of their homeland, I am reminded of something a Rohingya man named Jafar
said to me in Bangladesh back in 2009. [He said,] ‘Because we don’t have
citizenship, we are like a fish out of water, flapping and unable to breathe.
If we were given citizenship in Burma, we would be like that fish you catch and
then throw back into the water, where he belongs. We are still out of water, and
when a fish is out of water, he suffocates to death. We have been out of water
for such a long time and we are suffocating. We are suffocating to death.’
“Sadly, his words are more relevant now as they were
years ago.”
Suthep has been watching the Rohingya since 2008, often
using a drone camera to capture overviews of the situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine
state, where most of the refugees lived, and at Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh,
where most are now encamped. He’s also shot imagery of the far less-publicised Rohingya
camps in Aceh, Indonesia, and Thailand’s Ranong province.
One aerial shot taken in Cox’s Bazaar offers a glimpse of
what has become the largest refugee camp in the world, with more than 700 000
people enduring harsh living conditions and near-starvation.
In Ranong in 2009, Suthep took pictures of Rohingya men
showing the scars of brutal beatings inflicted by Burmese navy officials after
the boat they trusted to carry them to better lives was stopped in the Andaman
Sea. They spent two weeks in detention before being sent back to sea, bound for
Thailand, with the warning that they’d be killed if they returned to Myanmar.
UNCHR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, says there
were 99,956 refugees in nine camps in Thailand as of December, most from ethnic-minority
communities in Myanmar and mainly Karen and Karenni.
Harassed and endangered in their homeland, they’ve been
crossing the border for more than 30 years, and thousands of babies born in the
camps in four provinces along the frontier have grown into adulthood there,
having never seen their country of origin.
“The Rohingya crisis is the most serious issue in
Southeast Asia, with nearly 700,000 refugees having flocked to Bangladesh in
the last four months, joining 300,000 others already there,” says Alistair
Boulton of UNHCR.
“There are now nearly a million Rohingya living
temporarily in Bangladesh. It’s the worst situation in the region and the
fastest rise in a refugee population since the 1990s.”
The best solution, he says, would be for the Myanmar
government to recognise the Rohingyas’ fundamental rights.
Syrian photographer Issa Touma was already shooting
street life in Aleppo before the current momentous multinational conflict
began. It’s his hometown.
People seemed lively and cheerful in his pre-2012 images,
but the war has virtually emptied the city. The buildings that remain standing
are pockmarked with bullet holes. The fighting has greatly affected the younger
generation, with kids fond of “playing soldier” – when not sitting sullen and
sad.
Malaysian Rahman Roslan pointed his camera at Syrian
refugees in the Idomeni camps in Greece in 2016, where they’d been sheltered
for months after Macedonia closed its border, barring migration further into
Europe.
Russian Sergey Ponomarev watched the great northerly
exodus across the Mediterranean in 2015. His pictures were taken on the Greek
island of Lesbos and on the boundary lines separating Croatia from Slovenia and
Hungary from Serbia. Some of the shots show bloodied refugees attempting to dash
across the frontiers.
Frenchman Roland Neveu’s award-winning series “Years of
Darkness”, about the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, has been seen
before in Thailand. The guerrilla triumph drove tens of thousands of Cambodians
to the Thai border.
“I never imagined then that the events of 1975 would come
to be labelled as ‘the Asian Holocaust of our time’,” Neveu writes in the
catalogue.
Coskun Aral, a Turk, was in Iraq in 1991, when streams of
citizens fled to the slopes of snowy mountains to escape Saddam Hussein’s
chemical weapons and the “shock and awe” of Desert Storm. Their destination was
Turkey.
They were Kurds, Yazidis, Turkmens and Assyrians, walking
an enormous distance in debilitating conditions. “Many lost their lives,” Aral
says. “I saw mothers and fathers carrying the dead bodies of their
children.
“I hoped that I’d never witness such suffering again. Yet
it’s 2016 and the suffering has never ended. The deja-vu of exodus remains the
same, every now and then.”
Supported by UNHCR, the French Embassy, Asylum Access
Thailand and Amnesty International Thailand, the exhibition seeks to create “a
unified picture of people speaking different languages and leading different
lives, but sharing the same human rights”.
Piyanut Kotsan of Amnesty International Thailand
acknowledges that Thais tend not to be “fond of helping refugees” and blames it
on a lack of understanding.
“So we’re also doing public activities, both online and
offline, to encourage more conversation about refugees and why they need our
support.”
THE PEOPLE MOST IN NEED
- The exhibition “Exodus Deja-Vu” at the Bangkok Art and
Culture ends on Sunday. It travels next to Berlin, Munich, Paris, Geneva and
Toronto.
- Asylum Access Thailand will host a discussion on
“Alternative Living for Immigrant Children” on Thursday at 6pm on the fifth
floor.