Karen Williams
writes about a month spent working in the Rohingya refugee camps
Nearly a
million Rohingya refugees are currently housed in refugee camps in Bangladesh
after fleeing violence in Burma/Myanmar. The UN has called the violence ethnic
cleansing, with the Burma/Myanmar army accused of committing atrocities,
sometimes in collaboration with Buddhist villagers. There have also been
widespread allegations of rape and sexual violence committed against Rohingya
women and girls. Most of the Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh,
where they’ve joined other Rohingya refugees who have fled earlier bouts of
violence. Karen Williams spent a month working in the Rohingya refugee camps.
1. The photo tells
of a different man from the one in the longyi (sarong) sitting in front of me.
The passport-sized photograph in the ID badge that he wears over his T-shirt is
of a different person: a person who wears a well-fitting suit, white shirt and
a distinctive red tie. The small ID tells of a time and of a man who can never
be restored. Not to him nor to the nearly million others who fled across the
Bangladesh border the past year, compelled to leave at a moment’s spin while
busy cooking dinner, giving birth, or staring aimlessly out of the window.
Where is the photograph from, how did it get here? Did he carry it with him on
the flight here? If the photo was taken in the refugee camps in Bangladesh,
where did he find the suit and the well-knotted tie among neighbours who also
ran, just ran for their lives.
Before I spotted the
photograph, I had heard him talking frequently about his house: what he now
calls home after losing not only everything, but also everything that he was,
and all that he thought he and his family and friends would be in the future.
That future will now never come. His life is now tethered to that moment and
his exile risks becoming a permanent condition.
2. There was good
crockery and serving ladles at the party I went into the refugee camps. Food
aplenty for everyone and then some. After we had feasted, plate upon plate
coming around, with others lined up at the door, ready to take our places when
we left, there was more, more coming our way. This is not a small thing: to
allow yourself joy. And so we feasted at the celebration, singing, clapping
along, ending the meal with the plate of betel leaf/paan passed around. You are
this side of the border now; you live, and at some point you have to decide
that this is where you have to live.
3. I know the
statistics; I know the politics. But then, individually, the devastation, the
intimacy of learning to live with hopelessness hits you. This is their life
now, tied up in a suit, a tie knotted correctly and tightly. This is their life
now; this is what they must.
4. It is hard being
despised. If you are this despised, it is hard to justify your place on earth.
What have you done, what did you do, heh, because surely there must be
something, something that you did.
Thousands of stories
and nobody is faceless. Each brings that distinctive life, that whom they are,
right here. I look forward to the people I meet; enjoy the laughter, the moves
toward conversation. But there are the moments when an individual will just
slip away in the conversation, just melt into the wall when we are alone. With
one, two people I notice this: the ones who had the rich, rounded middle class
lives, before. They fall through a crack in the pause while telling me
something. Right in front of me they get lost.
5. The Rohingya
atrocities test my relationship with longstanding friends in Burma/Myanmar. The
brave peoples to whom I cherish and loved and who for the past few years can’t
wait to tell me, how much they despise these peoples now driven this side of
the border. They offer this in conversation, hurriedly wanting to get away from
the “What you been up to?” to talk of them.
All the years of
these activists’ bannings, torture, exile, being on security lists, families
dragged to prison again and again and they are now seemingly united in an
absolute hatred of them. It’s a unity that I cannot fathom: sudden and
seemingly impermeable. You can’t talk to it; it rests, there, alongside the
steel they forged internally in their years in prison, the beatings, the
torture, and the parts of what happened to them that they can’t joke away.
At the same time, it
is ironic that these despised refugees may be the only chance to alert the
wider world that what has happened relentlessly for decades across the country
to other ethnic minorities. It is still going on, and nobody even talks about a
solution anymore. Separate strands of wars against ethnic minorities have been
raging up and down the country – including what is called the world’s longest
civil war with the Karen, started before the country even gained independence.
The Karen ethnic group took up arms in 1947 – before Burma’s independence in
1948 – and for decades was one of the key ethnically-based armed resistance
groups who fought the Burma/Myanmar central government. Before that, the Karens
were instrumental in fighting with the British against Japanese occupiers.
6. I know the
politics of blame and am intimately close to its defenestrated history, razed buildings
and plunder that it leaves in its wake. It’s not a problem particular to this
region. I’ve turned it over in the stones along Istanbul, the telephones that
at some point would go dead that April-June 1994 in Kigali, I’ve heard it from
Uganda’s Asian exiles, growing old in London, wanting to go home.
7. It’s been Eid
recently: for many their first Eid in the place, here across the border, where
some point out that their cattle back home lived in the places that they do
now. But for the refugees whose first fleeing this is, they have not yet
affixed their lives to this exile’s calendar: our first Eid away from home, our
second Eid away from home, our third…. For them this is still the first Eid.
Years from now, maybe a generation hence, they will look back and say, “That
was our first Eid away from our home.” There are other refugees here, who have
been here much longer, ticking off the years of fleeing: 1942, 1979, 1990/1,
2016, and 2017.
For them, in their
sturdier homes and settled lives in the front part of the refugee camp, this
was just Eid, it comes by every year.
They find, in small
ways, how the new refugees and those who’ve been here from previous fighting
have grown past each other. The uncomfortable relationship of old Rohingya
refugees who grew up in Bangladesh and who are now suddenly identified with the
‘new peoples;’ 1979, 1991: it all lives on – people stranded/ estranged in the
separate strands of their exiles.
8. We’d like to
think that they were political and aware, and that they saw this coming. But
less than 12 months ago, somebody was chopping vegetables, stirring the pot for
supper when they immediately had to drop everything and go. There were those
who believed, who really believed that they had a place in their country, that
their home accommodated them. In their tie-and-suited lives they were government
officials, the ones from their stateless community who had “made” it. How
familiar that sounds. Until they show you your place. Now, they’re all equal
here, those with their English, their well-chosen ID photographs. The
Rohingya’s repeated history of fleeing and returning between Burma/Myanmar and
Bangladesh has mowed everybody to a miserable equality.
It rains here in
Cox’s Bazar in June and July, torrents down, the deluge washing through
everybody’s house. It rains in Burma/Myanmar too, whooshing down with a fury
that astonishes you, even if you’re used to south-east Asia’s rainy season. The
rain finishes what the dispossession started. Grief and horror, it levels the
driven-out.
9. I want to cry but
I’ve wanted to cry for decades. I know the tears won’t come: there’ll be
exhaustion, frustration, the stubborn refusal to get used to the fact that this
happens, the familiarity of the story. I will want to cry, as I already can see
the other forces that could shape this region. This dispossession will be easy
to hijack, to pressgang into larger histories of grievance and pushback: love
the story and be flippantly indifferent to the victim.
10. They cannot say
their name: In Burma/Myanmar they are referred to as Bengalis. I get cornered
by friends, veering the conversation (any conversation) to the topic of “these
Bengalis from Bangladesh who came over since the 1970s and now want to pretend
to be us”.
There is also the
other name they are referred to: explicitly understood across south-east Asia
to mean the dark-skinned ones. There is a dogmatic refusal in conversation, in
the Burmese media, even in official statements to dare to speak the name
“Rohingya”. But there is little compunction in using that other word, on
protest posters, in conversation, in soldiers’ boastful comments on their
kills.
I reach for history,
try to find a place, a foothold. This history is contested as people pick and
choose. But history does not provide a foothold. In the Rohingya’s case it is
the fact of their existence counterweighted with the visceral drive of a
country that wants them disappeared.
11. This must all be
contained in your life now, this life you would never have been able to
imagine. Your volunteer card carrying your face; with a well-fitted dark suit,
pressed white shirt even in this stifling tropical heat and dampness. The
well-knotted red tie that tells all: you were one of those who had a place to
go, before, where suits and ties were welcomed and the absences of them were
frowned upon. You had these multiple cultural languages, and now you are a
recipient, a number among hundreds of thousands.
And in the life that
you must now accommodate, you need to accommodate that man in his red tie, too.
How could he not have foreseen this? Who are you now: stateless on this side of
the border, and where does that man live now, who wears his suit back home,
does his wife still meticulously iron his white shirt for appointments that he
must keep? Does that man whom he was still live on, in his well-pressed suit?
Does that man keep as existing as you stand here, divested, erase?
12. There is the
genial older gentleman in front of me who has had to learn humility, and
quickly, since he came here. He still wears his sharp-edged civil servants
haircut. The T-shirt and longyi worn in public and “to work” must sit
uncomfortably on him, so used he was to his well-pressed suit as armour. This
is something else he has had to learn, and quickly. What gets recorded as
history now, and for the future of the Rohingya, will not contain the daily
learning of this man. It does not contain the clear path that that ID
photograph took, driven across the border into Bangladesh, suit-and-tie from a
time when he wore white pressed shirts, in a time when his name was his own.