World Refugee Day: No silver lining for Rohingyas

A once lonely road leading to the frontier town of Teknaf marked the end of the world’s most densely populated nation. Teknaf is often used to connote the end of Bangladesh, across which lies the unfamiliar hills and valleys of another world. For a land bursting to the seams with people, Teknaf seemed a desolate strip of land.

Not anymore.

No eagle’s eye is needed to notice the tens of thousands of makeshift huts dotting the once green hills. The former homes to teeming herds of deer and wild elephants are now the site of the world’s biggest refugee camp. Its inhabitants are Rohingya Muslim refugees from neighbouring Myanmar, a community that has earned the unenviable label of the world’s most persecuted people.

When the Rohingyas fled through the jungles, hills and rivers, the Myanmar security forces were not the only ones on the hunt. Islamophobia, long prevalent in Rakhine state meant that almost every local Rakhine Buddhist joined the hunt, tracking down dark skinned Muslims irrespective of age and gender, with many infants taken from their mother’s wombs and thrown into fire. Pursued not only by a trained military but much of the local population familiar with the locality, the minority Rohingyas had little alternative but to cross the international border for survival.

As the silver jubilee of World Refugee Day (June 20) approaches, there is no sliver of a silver lining on the cloud. Instead the clouds on the Rakhine sky only get darker, as a force with greater hatred for the Rohingya takes control of their homeland, leading to a renewed exodus of more than 150,000 Rohingyas. This year’s message from UNHCR for World Refugee Day is “Unitl Everyone is Safe”, and for the Rohingyas, hounded by Rakhine nationalists on the ground and the Myanmar military from the air, the message is sounding extremely hollow.

When Myanmar’s military unleashed a genocidal military operation in 2017, thousands of Bangladeshis from all parts of the country volunteered to help accommodate the refugees. A genuine sense of brotherhood prevailed as untrained men rushed to the region with anything they could manage in what seemed like a religious zeal to house Rohingya refugees fleeing in the hundreds and thousands.

Quite incredibly, the mostly untrained and often motley crew of volunteers somehow managed to erect a city of tarpaulins and bamboo structures over the green hills of the Teknaf region, driving away the local fauna to fend elsewhere. But on the silver jubilee of World Refugee day, almost nine years after the exodus, many who had helped back then are asking the hard question as to what the United Nations and the international community are doing to accommodate the Rohingya population, almost all of whom are presently stateless.

The helpless Rohingyas are however taking part in the celebrations with a smile on their lips. At the mercy of the development organisations, they need the UNHCR to raise funds and mobilise support. World Refugee Day. One of the participants is a young Rohingya man Mohammed (surname withheld for anonymity). At first Mohammed appears extremely enthusiastic saying, “For me, World Refugee Day is about sharing our daily struggles.” He smilingly expresses hope that World Refugee Day would allow their voices to be heard so that he and other Rohingyas might find a way to go back to their homeland.

But as the conversation goes on, more young people gather and once they are assured of anonymity, they begin to tell a different story. Expressing utter helplessness and anger at the international community, Mohammed says, “Every year there is a lot of speeches and messages of solidarity. But after all these years, many of us are still waiting for a real solution. For nine years, we have been waiting for justice and living in harsh conditions, conditions no human should have to endure. Our demands are simple. We are seeking your cooperation, collaboration and not charity to return to our motherland.”

The profound sense of helplessness among Rohingyas is universal. Most Rohingya express a desire to return home, but few can imagine how such a return might take place. Within Myanmar, hostility toward the Rohingya remains widespread. The Buddhist people who make up the majority of Myanmar have been resolute in their rejection of the Rohingya refugees. Since the advent of Buddhist nationalist platforms, there is an unequivocal hatred against the Rohingya Muslims among the vast majority of the population.

The genocide was followed by demands for building a ‘Bangladesh wall’ to keep out Muslims. Rather than protesting the genocide, the populist wave in Myanmar felt anger at the outside world for believing what they said were ‘false accounts made up by intruders’. Extremely hateful comments filled up the social media landscape in Burmese language. Since the civil war, these comments have disappeared as many Burmese felt this will antagonise the international community from whom they are hoping for support against the Tatmadaw, but most observers have found little reason to believe that someone has pressed a delete button on the Buddhist nationalist ideology.

Meanwhile in Myanmar’s brutal civil war, the genocidal government forces have been outmaneuvered by the Arakan Army, a nationalist force of Rakhine Buddhists. International stakeholders remain fixated at the genocidal government forces for their role in 2017 but the Rohingya consider the Arakan Army a much deadlier enemy.

There is an enormous gap at the threat perception levels between the Rohingyas who see the Arakan Army as the greatest threat to their existence, and the outside world, which finds more comfort in the simple but extremely misleading saga involving the evil Burmese Junta versus the heroic rebels. This kind of thinking is an enormous glitch in the UN’s World Refugee Day message of ‘safety for everyone’, as even minor support for some of the rebel groups, especially the Arakan Army threatens to permanently end Rohingya presence in Myanmar.

Unlike many other persecuted communities in the world, the Rohingya had more expectations regarding the UN hoping the international organisation was serious in saving them from their brutal predicament. UN credibility however took an enormous blow when Secretary General António Guterres accompanied by former Head of the Bangladesh interim government, Chief Adviser Dr Yunus visited the Rohingya refugee camp on March 2025 to host an iftar for nearly a hundred thousand refugees.

Out of the blue, Dr Yunus made the outlandish claim that Rohingyas would celebrate their next Eid in their homeland. While Guterres, a seasoned diplomat did not follow up on Dr Yunus’s rather injudicious claim, he did not publicly distance himself from it. The effect on UN’s credibility was devastating. Many outsiders, including Bangladeshis have a knack for supposing Rohingyas are inferior beings prone to gullibility; in reality they are an extremely disempowered community that often puts on a show of naivety for the benefit of their sponsors, the Rohingyas molded by generations of unparalleled brutality can be a lot of things, but they are not as easily susceptible to propaganda as one might suppose.

After eight world refugee days in a foreign land, lack of communications, promises of protection and peace that did not materialise, it is extremely unlikely that infinite goodwill shall prevail among a rapidly growing young population that have seen their mothers raped and fathers killed without anyone being able to deliver justice.

*Dr. Mahbubul Haque, Faculty Member, University Sultan Zainal Abidin (UNISZA), Malaysia

*Shudeepto Ariquzzaman, Research Fellow, Neeti Gobeshona Kendro, Dhaka