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History is easily rewritten by those who benefit from it. Today, Bangladesh’s governing BNP continues to celebrate the 1978 and 1990s Rohingya repatriations as success stories. But buried in the archives is the devastating testimony of a Norwegian nutritionist who witnessed the first of those so-called “successes” from inside the camps. Dr Cato Aall warned that refugees were being starved as part of a political strategy to push them back to Myanmar.

When he raised the alarm, the institutional cynicism was chilling. His own papers record the response:

UNHCR: “After the Second World War, we survived on 1,000 calories a day in Germany.”

WHO: “There is no serious nutrition problem among the refugees.”

UNICEF: “All talk about calories is bull-shit to me.”

Aall knew what these officials refused to admit - the refugees were starving. Food was sitting in warehouses and the technical knowledge existed, yet rations were withheld and thousands of children died.

My latest long read tells his story. Travelling between the camps on a small motorbike, Aall documented an “artificial famine.” For his efforts, he was systematically sidelined.

The Rohingya themselves were never passive spectators in this history. They resisted repatriation for months, refusing to return without meaningful guarantees of safety. Government "motivation meetings" were broken up, officials attempting to gather refugees were driven from the camps, and police opened fire. Repatriation gathered pace only after starvation, confinement and violence steadily narrowed their ability to refuse.

This is not simply a story about 1978. It is about the present. As Bangladesh once again talks about repatriation, the myths surrounding those earlier operations matter. The first mass return was not a humanitarian success. It was achieved through starvation, coercion and the complete denial of refugee choice. If we continue to remember it as a triumph rather than a warning, we risk repeating the same mistakes.

Read: The Doctor on the Motorbike

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Rohingya contacts in Malaysia describe a community under growing pressure. In recent weeks, they say, several Rohingya schools have been closed or fined. Vehicles have been seized. People have been beaten on the street. Families have been forced out of rental homes. Others report being denied treatment or pushed out of government hospitals and clinics when they cannot produce full payment upfront. These are the daily humiliations: shelter, movement, schooling, work and healthcare all becoming more precarious at once.

There are also reports of confusion, resentment and competition around UNHCR documentation and third-country resettlement. Rohingya refugees say protection is slow and uneven, while better-connected or better-educated people from other communities appear able to navigate the system more easily. I am treating some of these claims with caution because they need further checking. But the deeper point remains - the most vulnerable Rohingya, the poor, undocumented, illiterate and socially isolated, are the ones least able to protect themselves in this climate.

Read DVB OpEd

In the DVB piece, I focus on the ideas being floated in Malaysia. I focus on how refugees are turned into disease, how exclusion is repackaged as civic duty, and how violence at sea is made to sound like sovereignty. Posters and speeches matter because they prepare the ground for what happens next. Once a people are described as a cancer, denying them a home, a job, a clinic or a place in a classroom begins to look like treatment.

One frustration with the DVB version- the full poster was not embedded in the body of the article. Only a cropped detail was used as the hero image. I understand there may have been technical constraints, but this does the reader a disservice. The poster is not decoration. It is the evidence.

The whole point is to see how the design works - the cancer headline, the germ icon, the four instructions denying housing, vehicles, trade and employment, and the closing appeal to “shared responsibility”. Taken together, the poster shows how anti-Rohingya exclusion is being packaged as public safety and patriotic duty.

So I am publishing the full poster here, with a full translation below.

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Prof. Dr. Salawati Mat Basir is not a random commentator. She is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), the country’s national university. She holds her LLB, LLM and PhD all from UKM. She is UKM’s own Legal Advisor. She worked as a practising Advocate and Solicitor. She served as a post-conflict officer with UNCTAD, the United Nations trade body. She has received a state honour - the Darjah Setia Negeri Sembilan.

Her declared areas of academic expertise are Migration and Refugee Law, Public International Law, and International Development Law.

She co-researched and co-published a study titled “Isu Kemanusiaan: Kelangsungan Hidup Pelarian Etnik Rohingya Di Malaysia” — Humanitarian Issues: Survival of Rohingya Refugees in Malaysia.

She published on “ASEAN, Rohingya Refugees and Human Security.” She supervised PhD and Masters students on refugees. She has appeared at international conferences specifically on the legal aspects of statelessness and refugee protection as they apply to Rohingya.

She authored a paper titled “Non-refoulement and Right of Entry for Asylum-Seekers.” She published work on “The Role of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Protecting Refugee Children.”

To repeat, this is the professional biography of someone who built a substantial academic profile in migration, refugee law and international law.

A few days ago, Salawati appeared on a Malaysia Gazette programme, a podcast discussion on Rohingya arrivals titled “Rohingya Di Mana Nokhtahnya?” (Rohingya: Where Does It End?). The video is publicly available

In it, she described how neighbouring countries handle Rohingya boats. Thai and Indonesian coast guards, she said, have been shooting at them. Singapore coast guards, she said, “will definitely bomb the boats.” She then delivered a sarcastic verdict on Malaysia’s comparatively more restrained approach:

“Kita silap tak letak karpet merah kat laut tu. Karpet merah. Selamat datang ke Malaysia truly Asia.”

Translation: We were wrong not to lay a red carpet in the sea. Red carpet. Welcome to Malaysia, truly Asia.

The mockery was clear. Malaysia had been too welcoming. The red carpet comment was not a defence of the Rohingya - it was a contemptuous dismissal of any compassion extended to them.

Clip from Podcast: Malaysian refugee-law academic,Prof. Dr. Salawati Mat Basir repeats, without clear condemnation, talk of shooting Rohingya boats before they reach territorial waters.

The most serious moment came when she recounted military and security figures telling her: “Shoot. Shoot them. Don’t let them come into your territorial waters.” She did not condemn the idea. Instead, she integrated it into her own argument about sovereignty, security and defence.

Salawati made it clear this was not a passing remark. Her position, she said, is “jelas, tegas, takkan berubah” - clear, firm, will not change

Let’s analyse what this means.

Rohingya people boarding boats are, overwhelmingly, refugees fleeing genocide. Myanmar’s military carried out a campaign of mass killing, rape, and village-burning against the Rohingya that the UN Fact-Finding Mission described as acts bearing the hallmarks of genocide. Those who survive and attempt sea crossings do so in desperate, often unseaworthy vessels. Many die before they reach any coast.

The principle of non-refoulement, which Salawati has literally written about academically, exists precisely to prevent states from turning back people who face persecution. Even states that have not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, which Malaysia has not, are widely understood to be bound by this norm as customary international law.

That argument is not exotic fringe advocacy. It is the mainstream position in international refugee law scholarship. Salawati knows this. She has written about it.

The point is not that Salawati was ever a humanitarian saint. The point is that she knew the law, the language, and the stakes. AND still chose to speak in a way that made shooting, pushing back or bombing desperate people at sea sound like a reasonable expression of sovereignty.

She is not alone in the discussion, and the broader climate of anti-Rohingya sentiment in Malaysia provides the political context for why remarks like hers are made without apparent hesitation. The demonisation of Rohingya in Malaysian public discourse has accelerated in recent years. They are routinely described as invaders, criminals, demographic threats. The hostility is real, widespread, and politically convenient.

But, again, Salawati is not a street-level commentator swept up in a social media frenzy. She is a law professor at a national university whose expertise is refugee law. The standard that applies to her is different, and the failure is correspondingly more acute.

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In 2018 or 2019, I was speaking to a well-known Rohingya diaspora figure. He had just returned from a visit to Malaysia, where he had met various government officials. He told me: “Malaysians are cooking beef for the Rohingya” - meaning that Malaysia was about to do something significant for the community. I asked what he meant. He didn’t answer, retreating into that shell of privileged information that Rohingya spokespersons like to display from time to time.

I doubt he foresaw what dish Malaysia would eventually serve up.

That is a question worth exploring: where is Rohingya leadership in all of this? As a Malaysian law professor publicly signals that boats carrying their people should be violently pushed back, and does so firmly and with no intention of changing her position, the silence and organisational vacuum from those who claim to speak for the Rohingya is its own story.

A people can be failed by hostile states. They can also be failed by representation that confuses access with power and proximity to officials with protection.

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UNHCR Bangladesh had 100 vehicles across the Rohingya response, but only 29 drivers. Ten vehicles sat non-operational for long periods while the agency still paid more than $80,000 in rental fees for them.

It also paid $126,000 a year for an unused motel mainly for parking and storage, while a larger space next door was available for $36,000.

In 2022, UNHCR along with WFP created a global UN vehicle-leasing service that claimed to optimise fleets, reduce duplication, cut costs, lower emissions and improve efficiency. Yet in Bangladesh, the audit found UNHCR could not justify its own fleet use. UNHCR was publicly selling itself as a vehicle-efficiency expert while its Bangladesh operation was apparently running a bloated, poorly justified, expensive fleet.

Actually, not just in Bangladesh. I dug into this and the pattern is much bigger than Bangladesh. UNHCR repeatedly struggles to justify its cars, control its fuel or monitor partner vehicles. Cox’s Bazar is not an aberration. Bangladesh looks like one branch of a wider institutional habit.

UNHCR had a vehicle problem before Bangladesh

There is another OIOS audit called the “Audit of fleet and fuel management in UNHCR field operations”, report 2023/026, issued in July 2023. It covered January 2021 to October 2022. OIOS found that UNHCR had 8,481 vehicles across 127 field operations as of December 2022, with a net book value of $343 million. Its fleet had grown by 36% between 2019 and 2022.

OIOS said field operations often did not conduct needs assessments, leading to oversized or underused fleets. In South Sudan, Chad and Uganda, UNHCR disposed of 410 vehicles in 2022 that had reached the five-year replacement threshold but had mileage below 100,000 km. In South Sudan, many vehicles had apparently not moved in more than a year.

The audit also found that UNHCR could not properly justify 3,284 vehicles, or 44% of its total fleet, managed by partners under right-of-use agreements. It had poor records for motorcycles, weak monitoring of vehicle use, and unreliable fleet/fuel data.

This is where the staffer’s “beautiful vehicles” line becomes more than a joke. The global fleet audit shows that UNHCR’s vehicle culture is not a minor blip. It is an institutional obsession - too many vehicles, weak justification, poor data, weak tracking, and partner fleets that headquarters could not properly oversee.

UNHCR spent millions on tracking systems but still lacked reliable vehicle data

The global fleet audit also found that only 5,811 vehicles, around 75%, had tracking systems installed. There was a discrepancy of 1,085 vehicles between two UNHCR systems. In 76 field operations, 1,695 vehicles lacked tracking devices, and 1,069 installed tracking systems were not transmitting.

Even more absurdly, UNHCR had spent $16.7 million on FleetWave and vehicle tracking systems, but OIOS said it was not reaping the full benefits. Staff were still using manual Excel workarounds. Only 27 operations, or 23%, met the target for capturing vehicle fuel data.

So the problem was not simply “too many cars”. It was also that UNHCR had built a technological apparatus to manage those cars, spent millions on it, and still did not have reliable visibility over fleet and fuel.

OIOS had already seen the same problems for years

OIOS found weak visibility and accountability over fuel supplied to partners. OIOS also noted obsolete spare parts in South Sudan worth $435,027 and in the Democratic Republic of Congo worth $433,233.

That is significant because it shows that vehicle waste is not just about luxury optics. It runs through fuel, maintenance, spare parts, tracking systems, rentals, partner agreements and weak data.

The 2023 fleet audit explicitly says similar issues had already been identified in an earlier 2016 OIOS fleet audit. It lists recurrent problems across Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, Chad, Uganda, Afghanistan and South Sudan. These included inadequate fleet planning, weak needs assessments, ineffective fuel controls, potential vehicle misuse, poor data collection and weak monitoring.

UNHCR cannot plausibly claim these are isolated local mishaps. The auditors were effectively saying we have seen this before.

Ethiopia: idle vehicles, retained partner cars and half-million-dollar waste

A separate, dedicated OIOS country audit of UNHCR’s Ethiopia operations exposes an even more extraordinary parallel to the dysfunction in Bangladesh. In that country review, OIOS found that UNHCR Ethiopia leased vehicles under a global rental agreement worth $7.4 million in 2022–2023, but it had not done a comprehensive needs assessment. It planned for 421 vehicles in 2022 but actually had 500, causing additional costs of $659,255. In 2023, it planned for 548 but had 582, adding $284,040.

Even worse, 39 partner vehicles were not returned after agreements expired. That led to $660,000 in rental charges after expiry. UNHCR also spent an estimated $500,000 on 70 idle vehicles in 2023. Some vehicles averaged only 30 km per day, and the operation had not even implemented carpooling.

This is an extraordinary parallel to Bangladesh. It shows the same basic disease - vehicles kept without a serious needs assessment, rental charges continuing after expiry, idle cars burning money, and no disciplined fleet planning.

The 2023 UNHCR fleet and fuel management audit did not include Bangladesh as one of its sampled country operations. But it did single out Bangladesh in a section on vehicle rental policy, noting that the Bangladesh operation rented vehicles worth $7.5 million, with price differentials ranging from 11 to 112 percent across partners. In plain langague - UNHCR Bangladesh, or its partners, were paying very different prices for vehicle rentals for broadly comparable needs.

The audit language does not automatically prove fraud. There can be reasons for price differences. But in audit terms, it suggests UNHCR did not have proper control or cost discipline over vehicle rentals.

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Humanitarian Diplomacy?

Long before the latest audit, the agency’s vehicle arrangements in Bangladesh had already become a matter of public controversy. In 2023, Bangladesh customs accused UNHCR of irregularities involving 46 duty-free imported vehicles, including Land Cruisers, ambulances, trucks, Hiace vans and pickups, alleging that some had been transferred or used by government bodies and partners without the required customs approval. Bangladesh customs demanded about $7 million / Tk 760 million in duties, fines and interest, and locked UNHCR’s import BIN ( Business Identification Number). UNHCR denied violating government rules, but the dispute was revealing. It is also worth noting that the BIN was later unlocked “on humanitarian grounds”, and officials said they could not confirm whether UNHCR had agreed to pay the demanded amount.

That unresolved ending only deepens the suspicion - a multi-million-dollar vehicle dispute quietly melted away, without any clear public accounting of who authorised what, who used the vehicles, and whether the money was ever recovered. Or we can simply say that UNHCR can leverage the vulnerability of the refugee population as a shield to escape sovereign legal accountability and multi-million-dollar tax liabilities.

So, who is the humanitarian system actually serving?

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A major Bangladeshi newspaper, New Age, has published a report based on an internal United Nations audit from headquarters, identified as OIOS Report 2025/084. The investigation examines UNHCR operations in Bangladesh between 2023 and 2024 and reveals extensive mismanagement of funds intended for Rohingya refugees.

According to the audit’s findings, millions of dollars in aid failed to reach those in need, instead being lost to poor planning, significant inefficiencies, and contracts awarded to questionable companies. The report paints a damning picture of systemic failures within the operation.

Internal Oversight Services audit of UNHCR operations in Bangladesh

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Internal UN Office of Internal Oversight Services audit of UNHCR operations in Bangladesh, covering the period January 2023 to December 2024. The audit examines programme management, procurement, partner oversight, health services, infrastructure, logistics and resource use in the Rohingya refugee response, and identifies serious weaknesses, including unused facilities, duplicated projects, poor procurement planning, questionable vendor selection, weak health preparedness and significant avoidable costs. IF DOWNLOAD DOES NOT WORK GO TO LINK BENEATH

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The audit’s findings are not merely a matter of bad bookkeeping. In a refugee camp, administrative failure quickly becomes material harm. When facilities are built but left unused, medicines are poorly managed, health systems are allowed to decay, and epidemics are met without preparedness, the cost is paid by people who have no alternative provider and no freedom to leave. Nowhere is the scandal clearer than in the health sector.

The Medical Scandal

While the UNHCR’s public relations team spins narratives of health and well-being, the internal audit trail reveals a disregard for human life.

On the ground, the agency’s total lack of an epidemic preparedness plan left the camps utterly defenceless against a massive public health crisis in 2024, including 1.7 million cases of acute watery diarrhoea and rampant outbreaks of scabies affecting 40 percent and head lice 35 percent of the population..

Yet, amid this suffering, the UNHCR’s financial choices were jaw-dropping:

• The agency awarded a massive $1.82 million contract to a previously blacklisted vendor that was caught actively altering and forging the expiration dates on medical needles.

• The agency built a $1.5 million specialised hospital in Ukhiya and a 20-bed facility on Bhasan Char (fitted with $140,000 in solar equipment and a $74,301 X-ray machine). Both facilities sat entirely empty and unused, abandoned to dust due to weak planning and a failure to coordinate with local authorities (see below for more details).

• Purchased $24.2 million in LPG refills when actual camp needs were $18.7 million, unnecessarily burning $5.5 million.

• They invested $165,650 into a digital Health Information System meant to link stakeholders and streamline care. It has been completely non-operational since 2018, forcing staff to use chaotic, parallel systems that obliterate data quality.

Buying Favour and Indulging the Bureaucracy

While refugees were subjected to delayed distributions, clogged camp drainage, and unvetted, substandard construction, the UNHCR was busy ensuring its own comfort and maintaining political compliance from local authorities:

“The weak review of partner budgets resulted in large amounts not having sufficient details for monitoring, resulting in unnecessary expenditures, such as $85,000 paid as monthly allowances to government officials and $95,000 paid as biannual festival allowances.”

When they weren’t paying out “festival allowances” to local bureaucrats, the cash flowed inward. The agency spent $18,000 on corporate “honour boards,” $23,000 on staff uniforms, and $27,000 on a promotional documentary.

The 4 x 4 lifestyle was equally lavish. UNHCR maintained a fleet of 52 programme vehicles and 48 administrative vehicles, managed by 29 drivers. Ten of these vehicles sat entirely broken down and non-operational for extended periods, yet the agency mindlessly shelled out $80,000 in rental fees to keep them sitting idle.

Incompetence

For a system that routinely blames “declining global donations” for refugee camp shortfalls, the sheer volume of money thrown into a logistical black hole is staggering. According to the auditors, the potential losses from poor planning and corrupted procurement frameworks are systemic:

• Construction Monopoly: Between 2021 and June 2025, the UNHCR bypassed its own compliance and channeled $25 million to a single construction contractor. This contractor’s prices were 26% above market rates, locking in $6.5 million in potential losses. Four alternative vendors who were vetted and selected in 2024 and whose prices were up to 43% cheaper were never awarded a single contract.

• Tax Forfeiture: Because the agency completely lacked a comprehensive procurement plan, it delegated purchasing to local partners without executing its mandatory VAT-exempt status. The result? $6.5 million in completely irrecoverable taxes thrown directly out the window.

• The Motel: The agency paid $126,000 annually for eight consecutive years (totaling over $1 million) to rent an unused motel primarily for parking and storage, completely ignoring a larger, alternative space directly next door available for just $36,000 a year.

• Vanishing pressure cookers: The logic of procurement was entirely absent. In a single year, the UNHCR recorded the purchase of 95,609 pressure cookers but could only account for the distribution of 84,725. 10,884 pressure cookers simply vanished between the warehouse ledger and the camps. The agency cannot explain where they went.

The Bhasan Char Solar & Energy Fiasco

According to the internal audit report, the solar and energy intervention on Bhasan Char Island was a multi-layered disaster of wasted money, terrible planning, and unnecessary duplication of work.

• Wasteful Duplication: UNHCR spent $528,528 on energy projects on the island, completely ignoring a formal agreement that assigned all infrastructure development to the government. Because they didn’t coordinate, the UN paid to put solar panels on three facilities that the government had already completed at a cost of $80,000, and threw away an additional $25,000 on unnecessary voltage regulators.

• Solar Power: The agency spent $140,000 on solar equipment specifically to power a 20-bed in-patient medical facility on the island. The entire medical facility, including an expensive $74,301 X-ray machine, was left entirely empty and completely unused.

• Paid Supervisors for Broken Projects: Multiple energy projects on the island (totalling $337,142) sat completely idle and broken down. An internal review exposed shoddy workmanship, a total lack of backup battery storage, and zero training for operators. Shockingly, these systems were left abandoned for over ten months, even though UNHCR was paying a supervising partner $200,000 just to oversee them.

• The audit also exposes the emptiness of UNHCR’s language around “durable solutions”. Eight years into the crisis, 67 percent of funds were still being spent on immediate relief, while only 17 percent went towards empowerment and long-term solutions. In other words, the emergency has not been a temporary phase; it has become the operating model.

Humanitarian Gloss

When asked by Solaiman Salman of New Age, the UNHCR response was predictably sterile. Their spokesperson, Shari Nijman, claimed that “regular audits are important tools for assessing and improving our work.” Nijman also pointed out their formal acceptance of the recommendations and the promise of adjustments in their upcoming 2026–2029 strategy.

But the auditors themselves expose the lie in this defence mechanism. The report explicitly notes that although prior audit recommendations had been closed based on “documentary evidence” provided by management, the underlying structural issues were never actually resolved on the ground. The agency has mastered the art of correcting its paperwork while leaving the grift perfectly intact.

More than that, as we know UNHCR is very much invested in “story telling.” Look no further than a recent World Refugee Day op-ed titled “Finding hope,” penned by Juliette Murekeyisoni, the UNHCR Deputy Representative in Bangladesh. Murekeyisoni opens with a familiar bureaucratic move. She deploys her personal biography as a former refugee to construct an instant wall of moral authority. It is a calculated shield. By filtering the current Rohingya crisis through her own history of survival, she immunises the agency against external critique. The piece carefully converts the brutal reality of the Rohingya condition into a sentimental sermon on emotional resilience and eventual return. She deliberately obscures how the very agency she helps command is actively administering their permanent containment.

The visual layout of the article, captured in the hero image of the article (see above) exposes this institutional gaslighting. Kudos to the Dhaka Tribune picture editor for selecting that image. Directly beneath the bold, uplifting headline “Finding hope” and text that prattles on about “empowerment” and “investing in possibility,” the accompanying photograph reveals the unvarnished truth. Rohingya men and boys staring blankly out from behind heavy, choking coils of razor wire. The text asks the reader to look directly at a carceral cage and see a launchpad into the future for these people. The razor wire is the structural reality; the language of “uplift” is the administrative wallpaper Murekeyisoni uses to hide it.

In her narrative, “hope” is weaponised as a tool for management. It functions as a disciplinary promise of a future return to Myanmar that never arrives, turning a decade-long structural abandonment into a comforting interval. As I have long argued, this fiction serves everyone but the refugees. Bangladesh can insist the camps are temporary, international donors can evade long-term political responsibility, and UNHCR can maintain the highly lucrative funding cycles required to sustain its sprawling bureaucracy. While millions of dollars are sucked into the logistical black holes exposed by the OIOS auditors - enriching blacklisted needle vendors and padding the pockets of local officials with “festival allowances” - the Rohingya are told to feed on abstract hope behind barbed wire. Murekeyisoni’s text proves that for UNHCR, “empowerment” without political rights is nothing more than containment with a human face.

This is humanitarian containment at its most clinical. It is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that treats human suffering not as a tragedy to resolve, but as a permanent, appreciating asset to be managed for corporate survival.

Further Reading

How Bangladesh is Exploiting the Rohingya Refugee Crisis

Rohingya repatriation as a governance tool in Bangladesh

The Myth of Rohingya Aid Dependency

The Architecture of Rohingya Exclusion

In recent weeks, several Rohingya organisations, armed groups, diaspora networks and prominent individuals have rushed to congratulate Dr Khalilur Rahman on his election as President of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Some of those offering congratulations have had deeply troubled relations with Bangladesh. Most remarkably, even ARSA joined the chorus, despite the fact that ARSA’s leader is in Bangladeshi custody. Their leader was arrested a year ago last June when Rahman was both the high representative for Rohingya affairs and the National Security Adviser. Yet when it came to his UN appointment, ARSA curiously found little to criticise.

Diplomatic courtesy is normal. Congratulating someone on a prestigious international appointment is not unusual. The more interesting question is what exactly these organisations believe Khalilur Rahman has achieved for Rohingya refugees during his time in Bangladesh’s interim government and since.

There has been no expansion of freedom of movement. Refugees still cannot work legally. Access to higher education remains restricted. The legal status of the Rohingya has not changed. The biometric dispute affecting registered-camp families remains unresolved. Aid cuts and funding shortages continue. Bhasan Char remains in operation. Violence, insecurity and restrictions continue inside the camps. If these are the outcomes of “distinguished leadership”, as the Arakan Rohingya National Council put it, one struggles to see the distinction.

Defenders of Khalilur Rahman will no doubt point instead to his diplomacy. Certainly, he has been active internationally. But diplomacy should be judged by its purpose and results. Much of Bangladesh’s recent diplomatic effort has focused on securing more international support for the existing refugee response. More donor pledges. More burden-sharing language. More meetings. More appeals for funding. In other words, resources to sustain the current system of containment. Refugees remain confined to camps and excluded from meaningful rights. The diplomacy may have kept the Rohingya issue alive internationally, but it has not fundamentally changed the condition of the Rohingya themselves.

The latest statement by Bangladesh’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations illustrates the problem. Once again, Bangladesh has renewed its call for repatriation, emphasising the burden that nearly 1.2 million Rohingya refugees place on the country. In all these speeches, Rohingya appear primarily as a humanitarian burden to be managed until they can be returned. This language has become familiar. It makes repatriation sound like an active destination, when in truth repatriation functions as a governance fiction - invoked to justify containment, attract funds, and avoid rights-bearing inclusion.

What receives far less attention is what return would actually mean.

Bangladesh is simultaneously pursuing dialogue not only with Myanmar’s authorities but also with the Arakan Army, which now controls much of Rakhine State. This has been described by some observers as a pragmatic attempt to maintain working relations with whichever actors exercise power across the border. Yet diplomacy alone cannot solve the central political problem. The Rohingya were not merely displaced by conflict. They were stripped of citizenship, subjected to mass atrocities repeatedly, and driven from their homeland through a campaign that many governments and international bodies have described as genocide.

Under these circumstances, phrases such as “safe, voluntary, dignified and sustainable return” are little more than diplomatic rituals. Dignity is not a slogan. It requires rights. It requires citizenship and security. It also requires accountability and restitution for what was taken. A return that leaves the Rohingya stateless and dependent on the goodwill of whichever armed authority controls Rakhine is not a dignified return!

This is why the recent wave of congratulatory statements feels so hollow. The issue is not whether Dr Khalilur Rahman deserves congratulations on a personal achievement. The issue is whether Rohingya organisations are willing to tell uncomfortable truths.

What are those truths? Well, for a start, to make Rahman understand that Rohingya survive through a mixture of humanitarian assistance, informal labour, small businesses and community networks, yet remain excluded from all meaningful rights, legal status and political agency. If Rohingya leaders cannot say this openly to Bangladesh's most senior Rohingya diplomat, who will?

On one point, however, I do find myself agreeing with Dr Khalilur Rahman.

Khalilur Rahman argues that the previous Awami League government treated the Rohingya issue primarily as a humanitarian crisis, sought donor funding to manage it, and failed to take meaningful steps towards a durable solution. In his view, this approach helped prolong the crisis. Here is the quote from the Daily Star

He is entirely right. And I should perhaps offer him my own congratulations.

For some time now, I have argued precisely this. I have argued that Bangladesh’s Rohingya policy was not aimed at fixing the displacement, but merely at controlling it. Instead of prioritising human rights and political answers, the government focused on containing refugees and locking down donor money to fund an ongoing crisis - a permanent emergency. That argument did not make me popular. It attracted hostility and carried professional costs. Yet today, a version of the same critique is being voiced by one of the principal architects of Bangladesh’s current Rohingya policy.

For years, Bangladesh presented itself as the indispensable humanitarian host while donors funded an ever-expanding system of camps, barbed wire, fences, restrictions and aid delivery. The difficulty is that it is becoming increasingly hard to see how the current approach differs in substance. Khalilur Rahman deserves credit for correctly diagnosing the disease. The question is whether he has prescribed anything different from the treatment that produced it.

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Imagine fleeing genocide, surviving military massacres, and being confined to camps for nearly a decade ( and for some, decades), only to be told you now need separate prisons too.

Bangladeshi news outlets are reporting proposals for dedicated prisons for Rohingya detainees. Yes, really.

I found a report saying the Chattogram DIG-Prisons office sent a formal summary on 19 May to the IG-Prisons proposing a separate prison for Rohingya detainees in Cox’s Bazar. It says the proposal would go to the Home Ministry after review, and claims policymakers had already given “in-principle” consent.

According to an earlier Ajker Patrika report, 160 acres of khas land in Paglibil, Haldia Palong, Ukhiya, were allocated for a proposed Rohingya prison. The Forest Department later raised objections.

The linked Ajker Patrika report (see above) is very interesting. It says:

”Sources in the Prisons Department said that the Prisons Department wants to set up a separate and open prison for Rohingya prisoners on the model of Malaysia's CRP. Rohingya prisoners in various prisons in the country, including Cox's Bazar Prison, will be kept there. The prisoners will get leave once a month to meet their families. After the leave, they will have to return to the prison. Prison guards, police and non-governmental organizations will work in coordination there. Infiltrators and refugees in Malaysia are kept in CRP.”

Malaysia’s CRP (Community Rehabilitation Programme) is not a system for refugees. It is a rehabilitation programme for selected prisoners. It allows some low-risk inmates to serve part of their sentence outside conventional prisons while receiving training, work opportunities and supervision. Refugees and undocumented migrants in Malaysia are generally held in a separate immigration detention system. The two are not the same thing.

This makes the Ajker Patrika report all the more troubling. It appears to borrow the language of rehabilitation and “open prisons” from Malaysia while applying it to Rohingya as a refugee population. In effect, a programme designed for prisoner rehabilitation is being invoked to explain the segregation of a stateless minority.

The result is that what sounds benign on paper begins to look like something else entirely - a separate detention regime for Rohingya, administered by prison authorities, police and NGOs, and presented as reform!

The Rohingya already occupy the weakest position in Bangladesh’s legal and political order. Concentrating Rohingya detainees in dedicated facilities would create closed spaces with little scrutiny and immense opportunities for abuse. It is a gift to every corrupt official looking for an easy victim. Who is going to complain? Who is going to investigate? False cases are a big thing in the camps. Can you imagine how those cases will soar?

When a population has no vote, no citizenship, limited access to lawyers and little public sympathy, accountability goes out of the window. In such conditions, corruption and extortion do not disappear. They flourish!

Beyond the extortion and the legal loops lies an uglier truth. To funnel the Rohingya into a custom-built, separate prison system is nothing less than a form of modern apartheid under the guise of bureaucratic management. If Bangladesh actually proceeds with this plan, it will extend the architecture of containment that has defined Rohingya life for decades.

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Hat tip to journalist Shahenoor Akther Urmi for drawing my attention to the Ajker Patrika report.

Rohingya activist Noor Azizah is now facing a vile wave of abuse, threats and incitement from Malaysian social media users. I am not remotely surprised. Over the past week, Malaysians have piled into my own replies with hundreds of racist comments, slurs, demands to “remove Rohingya”, and instructions that I should “take them to the UK” and other unhinged insults and remarks.

On Threads, I do not usually post on Rohingya issues. Indeed, the other day I posted about the World Cup referee who was deported from the United States. I got over 200 replies from angry Malaysian netizens foaming at the mouth. Nothing to do with the post about the referee whatsoever.

But what is being directed at Noor Azizah is at another level.

A Malaysian friend has sent me a message warning that people online are allegedly trying to locate Noor Azizah in Sydney and inciting others to throw acid at her face. I have not verified every detail of that threat, but the fact that such language is even circulating tells us something very serious. This anti-Rohingya campaign is no longer just about petitions, memes or comment sections. It is producing a climate in which violence against Rohingya voices is being encouraged and normalised.

This is exactly what happens when a refugee community is repeatedly described as illegal, dirty, invasive, parasitic, criminal, ungrateful and undeserving of protection. Once that language becomes ordinary, some people begin to believe that harassment is patriotism, AND intimidation is public duty. Also, by extension, violence is a form of national defence.

Noor Azizah is being targeted because she is Rohingya and because she speaks. The abuse against her exposes the real face of this campaign. It is not a “debate” about immigration policy. It is not a disagreement about UNHCR. She was fed to a nationalist backlash. It is a racialised campaign to silence and remove a persecuted people from public sympathy.

The authorities in Malaysia and Australia, and the platforms hosting this material, should treat threats against Noor Azizah with urgency. Rohingya activists should not have to absorb this level of hatred simply for defending their community’s right to exist. Online racial panic does not stay online forever. It looks for a body to punish.

The Malaysian entertainment/news site Oh! Media framed the story not around the racist pile-on against Noor Azizah, but around the fact that she had made her Instagram account private after being “criticised by Malaysian netizens”. The article said her international speech had gone viral and caused “unease” among Malaysians. It noted that many users felt she had given Malaysia a bad image. That kind of framing is staggering. A Rohingya woman speaks about detention, persecution and survival; the story becomes all about Malaysian reputation and wounded Malaysian pride! Noor Azizah was not simply “criticised by netizens”. She was made the target of a racialised pile-on. To describe that as “Malaysians defending the country” turns mob hostility into patriotism.

To allow this to continue under the guise of “national pride” is a collective moral failure. Social media platforms cannot continue to profit from algorithms that turn targeted hatred into viral engagement. Governments cannot afford to treat transnational harassment as a minor internet grievance.

If Malaysians truly care about their country’s image on the world stage, they should look not at the words of a Rohingya survivor, but at the actions of the digital mob claiming to speak in their name.

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On Friday, 12 June, Hafsar Tameesuddin, Joint Secretary General of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), visited Nayapara Registered Camp to meet members of the Nayapara Kutupalong Registered Refugee Union (NKRRU). Scores of refugees attended the gathering, making it one of the largest public discussions yet held on the plight of families whose food rations and other assistance have been suspended following their refusal to undergo biometric re-verification.

During the meeting, community members explained why they had declined biometric registration. Many are long-registered refugees who were originally recognised by UNHCR in the early 1990s and already possess UNHCR-issued identity documents. They expressed concerns about identity, consent, and the handling of their personal data. Speakers argued that these concerns are neither irrational nor uninformed, but stem from decades of experience as a stateless and persecuted people whose identity has repeatedly been challenged.

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Refugees also described the consequences of their decision. Around 300 families comprising approximately 2,824 individuals have been excluded from food assistance for many months. Community members reported growing hardship, including food insecurity, loss of work opportunities, and the suspension of administrative processes affecting their families. They questioned why UNHCR and WFP continue to deny assistance when UNHCR’s own registration guidance recognises that individuals may refuse the collection of biometric data on legitimate grounds and that alternative arrangements should be available to ensure continued access to protection and assistance.

For many participants, the meeting carried significance beyond the immediate issue of rations. It represented the first time that a regional refugee rights body had formally engaged with them as an organised community. In a situation where affected families often feel ignored or dismissed, APRRN’s willingness to listen was seen as an important acknowledgment of their concerns and their right to be heard. Whether that engagement can now translate into dialogue with UNHCR and WFP remains to be seen, but for NKRRU members it marked an important step in a struggle that has now lasted well over a year.

Further Reading:

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The racist Change.org petition demanding the “removal” of Rohingya refugees from Malaysia is now under review.

But the anti-Rohingya campaign has not disappeared with the suspension of one petition page. It is mutating. It has moved from petition language to social media vigilantism, from “resources” and “security” to crude attempts to identify, isolate and mark out Rohingya bodies in public space.

The latest example is a poster circulating on Malaysian social media asking:

“How do you distinguish a Rohingya person from a Bangladeshi?”

On the surface, the poster tells people not to rely on face, skin colour, beard, nose shape or clothing. It says Rohingya and Bangladeshis may look similar. It advises people to look instead at documents, language, or a person’s own explanation of their origin. It ends with the soft line: “Respect every individual. Do not judge only from the outside. We are all human.”

That final sentence is supposed to make the whole thing sound humane. It does not. Because the question itself is already rotten.

Why are Malaysians suddenly circulating graphics about how to distinguish Rohingya from Bangladeshis? Why has this become a public concern? Why are people being sorted like this at all?

The answer is obvious. The anti-Rohingya climate has become so ugly that people are no longer only debating policy. They are trying to identify bodies.

This is where racist panic always goes. First comes the petition. Then the rumours. Then the memes. Then the “educational” graphics. Then the street-level sorting - who belongs, who does not, who is legal, who is illegal, who is safe, who can be harassed, who can be removed.

A poster that asks how to tell Rohingya from Bangladeshis is not neutral information in the present climate. It is ethnic sorting under mob conditions. The issue is not that Bangladeshis may be mistaken for Rohingya. The issue is that Rohingya have been marked as people against whom hostility is already presumed.

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There are already social media posts making the logic explicit. On Threads, one post used almost the same framing — “How do you distinguish Rohingya from Bangladeshis?” — with the phrase “Takut tersalah lempang”, meaning roughly - afraid of slapping the wrong person.

That sentence strips away all pretence.

The concern is not that someone may be assaulted. The concern is that the wrong person may be assaulted. This is what the poster’s softer language cannot hide. In a climate where Rohingya are being demonised as criminals, invaders, parasites and burdens, identification graphics do not simply “educate”. They help normalise the idea that Rohingya are a category to be detected.

And once a population has to be detected, it is already being prepared for punishment.

This is why the Change.org petition mattered. It did not create anti-Rohingya racism in Malaysia. That racism has been circulating for years in media narratives, political speech, immigration enforcement, social media rumours and public hostility. But the petition gave it a mass political vehicle. It transformed prejudice into a visible count. More than 400,000 signatures told the mob that its instincts were not shameful but popular.

Now we are seeing the next stage.

Rohingya are being discussed not as refugees, not as survivors of genocide, not as stateless people denied citizenship and protection, but as a public nuisance to be identified and removed. Bangladeshis are being pulled into the panic too, not because anyone has suddenly discovered concern for migrant workers, but because the mob needs a way to avoid “mistakes”.

That is the obscenity. The question being asked is not how to stop attacks on vulnerable migrants and refugees. The question being asked is how to make sure the right brown Muslim body is targeted.

The profiling panic is not developing in a vacuum. It is being fed by official language too. Malaysia’s Home Minister, Saifuddin Nasution Ismail, recently stressed that registration under the government’s Refugee Registration Document Programme does not mean refugees and asylum seekers will be allowed to remain permanently in Malaysia. He said the “end points” are only three - return when the country of origin is safe, third-country resettlement through UNHCR, or deportation for those who break Malaysian law. He also described a process involving security checks, biometrics, facial recognition, voice recording and state monitoring.

All this may sound calm from a ministerial podium, but in the present climate, it lands in the street as permission - these people are suspect. They are trackable and removable. When official policy reduces Rohingya to a file to be screened, monitored and eventually moved elsewhere, it should surprise no one when social media begins asking how to identify them by sight. The mob does not invent its vocabulary from nothing. It often borrows from the state.

Class Contempt

The people being placed under suspicion are workers, street sellers, refugees, undocumented migrants, people in markets, people on the margins of legality and survival. Their poverty becomes evidence as do their clothes. Their accents become evidence. Their faces too. Their very presence becomes evidence.

See the graphic above. On the left, “Malaysian” is presented as clean, smiling, colourful, respectable multiculturalism. “Not Malaysian” is represented by poor, dark-skinned, displaced-looking people with tired children. So the line is not really about citizenship. It is about class, race, poverty and who gets to look like they belong.

The idea is to sanitise racism as patriotism. So Malaysia’s diversity is celebrated when it is useful for tourism posters and national branding. But the moment vulnerable migrants or refugees enter the picture, the same society suddenly discovers borders, disgust and moral panic.

This is how xenophobia becomes a street-level technology. It tells ordinary people that they are entitled to inspect, classify and suspect others. So that public space becomes a checkpoint and people become immigration police. And then let the mob do the rest.

The first poster even says that if someone’s identity is uncertain, it is safer to use the general term “foreigner”.

Safer for whom? Not for the person being labelled.

In the current climate, “foreigner” is not a neutral description. It is a category for suspicion. It is the word people use when they want to avoid the responsibility of knowing who someone is. It allows Bangladeshis, Rohingya, migrants, refugees and stateless people to be pushed into one disposable mass.

That is exactly the logic that has always endangered Rohingya in Malaysia and across the region.

When Rohingya are repeatedly described as illegal, foreign, burdensome, PATI, or a security problem, rather than as people with rights, it should not be surprising when harassment and intimidation follow.

This is why Malaysian civil society organisations were right to warn that anti-Rohingya hate is no longer confined to the digital sphere. Community leaders have reportedly received threats. Personal information and home addresses have been circulated online. Families are living in fear. The lie that Rohingya are demanding citizenship, power or territory has been used to inflame public anger.

And now identification graphics are circulating. That should frighten anyone who knows how these things develop.

Rohingya have already survived the politics of identification. In Myanmar, identification was never a harmless bureaucratic act. It determined citizenship, movement, food, marriage, education, healthcare, policing, detention and survival. Rohingya know what happens when the state and the crowd become obsessed with who belongs and who does not.

They know what happens when documents become weapons. Rohingya know what happens when neighbours are invited to identify “the outsiders”. They also know what happens when a people are first named as a problem and then treated as removable.

Malaysia should know this too. Wang Kelian should have been enough. The mass graves on the Malaysia–Thailand border were not an accident of nature. They were the result of a regional system that treated Rohingya and other migrants as illegal, disposable and tradable. When states deny people legal protection, traffickers and mobs understand the message perfectly.

Attack the Messenger

The backlash to my own small role in this episode has been instructive. Several Malaysian outlets identified me as the journalist who wrote to Change.org asking for the petition to be reviewed and removed. One MyNewsHub report was relatively straightforward - it noted that I had argued Change.org was not merely a passive platform, because hosting the petition gave it reach, legitimacy and momentum. That is exactly the point.

But beneath that and similar posts in other outlets came the revealing part - thousands of comments, many of them not debating refugee policy at all, but demanding the closure of UNHCR Malaysia, calling Malaysia “not a transit country”, telling me to take Rohingya into my own home, accusing me of being Rohingya, a foreign agent, a UNHCR stooge, sharing gifs of a face spitting at me, or worse.

This is the atmosphere the petition helped summon. The comments were not the language of sober policy disagreement. They were the vocabulary of expulsion - “halau balik”, send them back; “tutup UNHCR”, close UNHCR; “Malaysia bukan negara transit”, Malaysia is not a transit country. Others went further, treating Rohingya as disease carriers, lawless intruders, criminals, ungrateful guests, or people who had dared to ask for “equal rights”. The repetition itself became a kind of chant. Close UNHCR. Remove them. Send them away. Shut up, foreigner. Take them to your house. Keep Rohingya on your bald head etc.

It is a mob rehearsing its lines.

The same logic is now circulating visually. One graphic tells Rohingya to “sila berambus dari negara kami” - please get lost from our country - over an image of a crowded boat approaching Malaysia. Another meme circulates a supposed quote from Min Aung Hlaing implying that Malaysians will now understand why Rohingya were eliminated. Its purpose is obvious - to turn genocide into vindication. These images strip away the polite vocabulary of the petition. The petition said resources, security and humane solutions. The memes say what that language was always preparing - get out, disappear, you do not belong here, genocide was ok.

The precise chronology matters less than the atmosphere now taking shape. The petition, the abusive comment sections, the calls to shut UNHCR, the profiling graphics, the island fantasies (calls to move Rohingya and even UNHCR to an isolated island), the boat memes and the expulsionist slogans all belong to the same political milieu. They feed one another. They tell the public that Rohingya are not refugees with rights, but a problem to be identified and removed. It is a climate of racial panic, moving across platforms and becoming more confident with each repetition.

That is why the warning needs to be sounded clearly. When a society begins asking how to distinguish one vulnerable brown Muslim migrant from another, when people joke about “slapping the wrong one”, when refugees are portrayed as an invading mass, and when UNHCR itself becomes a target of public rage, the danger is no longer confined to social media. The petition page is down. But the wider campaign it helped legitimise is still alive. It must be confronted now before the question “who are they?” becomes the prelude to “what should we do to them?”

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The racist petition demanding the “removal” of Rohingya refugees from Malaysia is now down and marked as under review by Change.org.

Good.

But it should never have taken this long.

By the time Change.org acted, the petition had gathered more than 420,000 signatures. That is not a small misunderstanding or ordinary civic concern. Nor was it a harmless call for better refugee policy. It was a mass campaign targeting a stateless, persecuted people who have nowhere safe to return.

The petition’s organisers tried to disguise bigotry through the language of resources, crime, public services and national security. They did not need crude slurs. They had a cleaner method. They framed Rohingya refugees as a burden on Malaysia, a threat to order, a pressure on public services, a danger to citizens. Then they wrapped the demand for removal in the language of “humane solutions” and “alternative solutions”.

That is how respectable racism speaks.

I wrote about this in my first Substack piece on the petition, arguing that it was not the opposite of hate speech but hate speech after it had learned the language of policy. The petition took a draconian demand - get rid of this unwanted minority - and dressed it up as administrative common sense.

Razia Sultana, the Rohingya human rights defender, then wrote a powerful guest post for Rohingya Refugee News. She reminded readers what “removal” means to Rohingya. It is not an abstract bureaucratic word. It carries the memory of burned villages, pushed-back boats, trafficking camps, Wang Kelian, and unmarked graves. Her warning was stark - when states and publics call Rohingya “illegal”, traffickers call them cargo.

Anyone who still doubts the racism behind the petition should look at the replies to my tweets here and here.

What they will find is not thoughtful concern about refugee policy. They will find contempt, dehumanisation, collective blame and open hostility towards Rohingya. They will find exactly the atmosphere that petitions like this help create - a climate in which people begin to imagine that an entire refugee community can be removed, cleared away, punished or taught a lesson.

That is why Change.org cannot pretend to be a passive noticeboard.

Its platform gave the petition visibility. It made it searchable, shareable and measurable. The signature count itself became part of the politics. Every new milestone gave the campaign more legitimacy and more momentum. It turned anti-Rohingya hostility into a scoreboard.

So I wrote to Change.org and asked for an urgent Trust and Safety review.

I made several points.

First, the petition targets Rohingya refugees as a group. It does not call for a specific policy reform. It calls for the collective “removal” of an ethnic refugee population.

Second, Rohingya are not ordinary migrants who can simply be sent “home”. They are a stateless people who have survived genocide, apartheid conditions in Myanmar, village burnings, forced displacement, trafficking, detention, sea pushbacks and the mass graves of Wang Kelian. To demand their removal without asking where they can safely go is a failure of basic humanity.

Third, the petition uses unsubstantiated claims about resources, crime and security to turn a vulnerable population into a public threat. That is not responsible public debate. It is scapegoating.

Fourth, Change.org’s role matters. The platform is not neutral when it hosts, amplifies and legitimises a campaign of this kind. It provides the infrastructure through which hatred is organised, counted and displayed.

Fifth, this is a foreseeable harm situation. The petition has generated intense online hostility. There are disturbing reports, still requiring verification, of possible vigilante mobilisation against Rohingya traders. Responsible platforms do not wait for violence before acting. They assess risk before people are harmed.

This is why the petition should not merely be “reviewed”. It should be removed permanently.

A petition does not become less racist because hundreds of thousands of people sign it. It becomes more dangerous. It invites people to mistake numerical force for moral authority. It tells a vulnerable minority that their existence in public life can be put to a vote.

Change.org has taken the first step. Now it should finish the job.

Remove the petition.

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Editor’s note: This guest post by Rohingya human rights defender Razia Sultana responds to the Malaysian petition demanding the “removal” of Rohingya refugees. Razia Sultana writes from the perspective of a Rohingya activist and researcher, and connects the petition to a wider regional history of refoulement, trafficking, land loss and erasure.

I am a Rohingya human rights defender, founder of Rights of Women Welfare Society, and member of the UN Women Civil Society Advisory Group. I am the author of Kill Them All, Unravelling the Maungdaw Exodus, and My Nightmare Passage.

Asking for our rights is not seeking sympathy. It is claiming what we deserve. This is not about empathy. It is about equality. I am writing because 190,000 people (and counting) in Malaysia signed a petition to “remove” my people.

They did not use slurs. They used spreadsheets. They called expulsion “alternative solutions” and “humane”.

But for Rohingya, the word “removal” is never innocent. I documented in Kill Them All and Unravelling the Maungdaw Exodus how the language of removal has accompanied violence against our people. It was there before the villages burned. It was there before people were killed. It was there before families were forced to run again.

“Removal” is not a simple word. It is part of the plan to destroy a people who are now running from country to country to save their lives.

Malaysia’s media broadcasts videos of Rohingya children begging, their faces shown. But it does not ask who organised a 190,000-signature petition to expel genocide survivors. It does not ask why the language of removal keeps returning wherever Rohingya seek shelter.

This is not just civilian anger. Rohingya activists have long warned that anti-Rohingya narratives circulate through regional networks, including extremist and nationalist actors. These campaigns repeatedly label Rohingya as a security threat, as outsiders, as invaders, as people who do not belong.

For Rohingya, this petition is not only a Malaysian issue. It is part of a regional pattern.

A Rohingya-less Rakhine

For decades, the process of vanishing the Rohingya has not been Myanmar’s decision alone. It is a collaborative process.

It was clear in the 2012 Sittwe massacre. Where are the Rohingya of Sittwe now? Our land and coastal resources were taken for deep-sea ports and energy pipelines. Did anyone investigate why it happened? No.

Then came the 2017 exodus from Rakhine. Where are those people? In Bangladesh camps. And their land in Rakhine? Under construction for tourist zones, industrial parks, and resource extraction projects backed by foreign investment. Is there any investigation? No.

So what is happening?

A Rohingya-less Rakhine is a huge project.

It is not just a land grab. It is also a religious cleansing project. Our people will either die or live as slaves because Rakhine is being remade into a Buddhist ethnostate. The Arakan Army now controls much of the territory, but the ideology comes from decades of 969 monk sermons: that Arakan belongs to Buddhists, that Muslims are “invaders”, that a “pure” Rakhine means an “Arakan without Muslims”.

That slogan is now policy. Our land, offshore gas and deep-sea ports fund it. But the goal is religious: erase Islam from Arakan’s soil. Rohingya lives are the price of Buddhist domination.

That is why Malaysia’s petition is a warning. For Rohingya, it feels like a death sentence. Anytime, anywhere Rohingya take shelter, the massacre starts again in the name of national security, border security, or by blaming us as terrorists.

It is very simple mathematics.

In Unravelling the Maungdaw Exodus, I documented how the Arakan Army used the same language of “removal” in operations that burned Rohingya villages between November 2023 and February 2024. The perpetrator changed. The vocabulary did not.

Now Malaysia’s petition speaks that word.

This is not a coincidence. This is the export of a plan.

Wang Kelian, written on paper

Malaysia already has a precedent for “removal”.

In 2015, the mass graves of Wang Kelian exposed the bodies of Rohingya trafficking victims. It showed the human cost of ASEAN’s refusal to grant us legal status.

“Removal” does not end at a border. It ends in an unmarked grave.

This petition is not new policy. It is Wang Kelian, written on paper.

My report My Nightmare Passage documents the chain: when ASEAN states call us “illegal”, traffickers call us cargo. Wang Kelian is where that cargo was buried. I documented survivors who were beaten for ransom in jungle camps, watched others die of starvation, and buried the bodies themselves.

This is what “removal” delivers when states refuse legal protection.

This chain is already moving. In December 2023, mobs in Aceh, Indonesia, attacked Rohingya shelters, dragged refugees from buses, and demanded their deportation. The violence was organised online, then executed in the streets. After Aceh, anti-Rohingya incitement spiked in Cox’s Bazar. Bangladesh contained it, but the pattern is clear: each local attack tests the next country.

Malaysia’s 195,000-signature petition is Aceh scaled up. This is not only public opinion. It is a transnational campaign, one country at a time.

ASEAN’s policy of non-existence

Malaysia’s administration should investigate how this happened. Malaysia is a Muslim-majority country and the current chair of the OIC. How did 130,000 signatures appear to demand the expulsion of genocide survivors?

This is not an issue about Malaysia alone. This is ASEAN’s policy in practice: not non-interference, but non-existence.

ASEAN states do not want to discuss Rohingya. They do not care if Rohingya live or die. They will not admit we exist. Our erasure is their consensus.

The project to erase us is transnational. From India to Sri Lanka to Thailand, well-funded campaigns label Rohingya a “security threat”. The Malaysia petition is not isolated. It is the Malaysian branch of a regional operation with one goal: a Rohingya-less Rakhine.

Yet watch what happens at high-level events, meetings, conferences and UN conversations. Rohingya are the poster. Our photos are used for fundraising. Our suffering is a panel topic. Millions are raised in our name.

But no state is eager to say the root of the issue: Rakhine is our land. We are the people of Arakan. And a transnational project — driven by religion, resources and geopolitics — is erasing us for profit and purity.

We have no voice in those rooms, only our faces on banners. The same governments that host “Rohingya dialogues” deport us, detain us and debate our “removal”.

Malaysia calls us PATI- illegal immigrants - with no right to work, school or healthcare. Thailand pushes boats. Indonesia pushes papers. Both push Rohingya to death: one by water, one by bureaucracy.

There is no humane deportation for genocide survivors. Refoulement is a crime.

We are not new victims. For 250 years, Rohingya have survived cycles of colonialism — British, Burmese, and now a Rakhine power claiming our land. Each era tried to make us slaves or graves. We are still here.

“Removal” is just the latest word for an old crime.

What must happen now

Therefore, I demand:

Malaysia must publicly reject the petition, investigate who organised this incitement to refoulement, and enact refugee protection law.

ASEAN must put Rohingya citizenship and restitution of Rakhine land and resources on the summit agenda. It must suspend Myanmar until it complies with the ICJ provisional measures.

The OIC must audit member states’ treatment of Rohingya and sanction governments using “security” or religion to justify erasure. The Ummah is not a conference theme.

The UN and donors must condition all funding on political solutions in Rakhine, not endless camp maintenance. Stop using Rohingya as posters if you will not defend our right to return.

This is not a Malaysia issue. This is the regional blueprint for our extinction.

Rakhine without Rohingya is not peace. It is conquest — for religion, for resources, for power.

We are not a fundraising prop. We are not a security threat.

We are native to Arakan.

And we will not be erased.

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An online petition calling for the “removal” of Rohingya refugees from Malaysia has rapidly gathered (at the time of writing) over 130,000 signatures in four days. Addressed directly to Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, its title is stark and uncompromising - “Remove Rohingya from Malaysia.”

On its surface, the text does not scream. It avoids crude slurs, bypasses explicit incitement to violence, and even pauses to claim that it understands the “humanitarian aspect” of the crisis. But that clinical calm is precisely what makes it dangerous. This is not the raw, unpolished hate speech of internet trolls; it is racism dressed up as administrative common sense. It presents mass expulsion not as a human rights violation, but as prudent public policy and national self-care.

The title of the petition is the only loud bit. Everything that follows is a sanitising operation designed to whitewash a draconian demand into the respectable vocabulary of governance.

The Petition’s Four-Part Argument

The petition builds its case through four familiar approaches. First, it turns Rohingya refugees into a resource burden. They are not presented as people fleeing persecution, but as pressure on infrastructure, social services, healthcare and public budgets. The text avoids saying, “We do not want them here.” Instead, it says, “The system cannot cope.” The result is the same, but the language sounds more respectable.

Second, it turns scarcity into competition. Malaysians are invited to see refugees as people taking something away from them - jobs, services, space, aid or security. This redirects public anger away from deeper structural problems such as inequality, weak services, inflation and labour exploitation, and attaches it to a displaced population with no power.

Third, it creates security anxiety without evidence. The petition refers vaguely to “reports of crime rates increasing” in areas where refugees live. It does not have to prove collective criminality. It only has to create an association between the Rohingya and crime. The caveat, “while not all refugees are involved”, sounds reasonable, but it actually deepens the insinuation. It says, in effect, we are not blaming all of them, but you know what we mean.

Fourth, it hides removal behind humanitarian language. Terms such as “alternative solutions”, “third countries”, “home regions in Myanmar” and “humane solution” make expulsion sound like a technical policy option. The demand is removal. The vocabulary is management. This is the petition’s central laundering move - it turns a call to get rid of a persecuted minority into the language of orderly governance.

This rhetoric is highly effective because it operates within a deliberate legal vacuum. Malaysia possesses no domestic legal framework for refugee protection and has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention. While UNHCR records show that as of early 2026 there were roughly 215,600 refugees and asylum-seekers registered in the country - including over 126,000 Rohingya - these numbers carry no weight under domestic law. Instead, refugees are legally flattened into the criminalised category of PATI (Pendatang Asing Tanpa Izin - undocumented migrants).

When a petition demands “removal” in this environment, it is not a neutral policy suggestion. It is a direct green light to the existing machinery of the state. It speaks to a public culture where refugees are already subject to immigration raids, indefinite detention, and systemic labour exploitation. Once an entire population is codified solely as illegal foreigners, every subsequent cruelty can be branded as mere law enforcement.

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The History of “Humane” Deportation

The petition’s rhetoric may appear contemporary, but its architecture is old. More than two decades ago, Human Rights Watch documented how Malaysia’s immigration system treated Rohingya not as refugees but as “illegal immigrants”, exposing them to detention, deportation and abuse. The report also quoted Malaysian public discourse that described undocumented migrants as competitors for jobs, sources of crime, threats to security and a financial burden on the state. The current petition merely updates that older grammar. It turns Rohingya into a resource burden, converts scarcity into competition, invokes crime without evidence, and then presents removal as administrative necessity.

Wang Kelian should haunt any Malaysian discussion of “removal” - the 2015 mass graves on the Malaysia–Thailand border exposed what can happen when refugees and migrants are pushed into systems of trafficking, extortion and official neglect.

In 2020, during an earlier wave of anti-Rohingya xenophobia, the Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy (CENTHRA) issued a statement that seemed, at first glance, to speak in the language of human rights and Islamic compassion. This was not some fringe anti-migrant outfit. CENTHRA was known in Rohingya circles and regarded as a sympathetic, respected human rights organisation. Which is precisely what made the line buried inside its statement so revealing:

That phrase exposes the fundamental contradiction of respectable xenophobia. When even a group seen as friendly to the Rohingya can imagine deportation as something that merely needs better manners, the problem is not just open hatred. It is the respectable humanitarian vocabulary through which removal becomes thinkable. What exactly is a “respectable” and “humane” deportation when applied to survivors of a genocidal campaign?

By 2021, Malaysia deported Myanmar nationals despite a court stay order, drawing international criticism for violating the principle of non-refoulement, which bars returns to danger. In 2022, Human Rights Watch said Malaysia had accelerated summary deportations to Myanmar without assessing asylum claims, including for Rohingya and other Myanmar nationals.

For the Rohingya, deportation does not mean an orderly bureaucratic transfer through an international airport terminal. It means refoulement - forcible return to a military junta in Myanmar that stripped them of citizenship, torched their villages, and slaughtered their families. In this region, it has historically meant something even cruder. It means pushing starving families back into the open sea to drift, drown, or disappear. There is no humane way to enact persecution. There is no respectable way to tow a boat of desperate people back into open water.

Making Removal Respectable

The petition’s ultimate utility is that it offers its signatories a moral insurance policy. It tells them they can retain sympathy for the Rohingya in the abstract while demanding that they disappear from local streets, schools and workplaces. It suggests that protection amounts to a form of theft from citizens. It recasts refugee survival as a threat to national welfare. It is the slow, deliberate cultivation of a public common sense that renders a vulnerable minority socially deportable long before they are ever actually expelled.

When the mainstream so easily absorbs the logic of exclusion, the distance between administrative language and structural violence vanishes entirely. Once a population is made socially deportable, the line between policy and violence disappears. What begins as “order” becomes permission - permission to detain, remove, and abandon people whose only crime is that they are unwanted.

Further Reading:

The other day I wrote about Rajeev Bhattacharyya’s latest piece in The Diplomat on Htan Shauk Khan/Hoyyar Siri, where he tries to push back against Human Rights Watch’s massacre report. He does so by relying on three interviews conducted inside Arakan Army-controlled territory. My point was simple: “from the ground” is not a magic spell. If the ground is controlled by the armed group accused of the atrocity, then access itself becomes part of the story.

Today I want to look back at an earlier piece he wrote in October 2024, also for The Diplomat, on Buthidaung town after the Arakan Army’s takeover. Reading it now, after his May 2026 article, is revealing.

The same method is already there - AA-mediated access, constrained or captive sources, heavy emphasis on ARSA and junta culpability, and a steady effort to soften or complicate findings by the UN, Human Rights Watch and satellite investigators.

The October 2024 piece reveals that Rajeev Bhattacharyya has a deeply entrenched, long-standing pattern of carrying water for the Arakan Army. His journalistic playbook hasn’t changed at all - he has simply recycled the exact same propaganda mechanics over a two-year period. Same script, different date.

Here is an analysis of what Rajeev is doing in the 2024 text, and how it completely reinforces my critique of his later work:

The Same Script, Just a Different Date

In his 2026 piece on Htan Shauk Khan, he tried to dismiss a Human Rights Watch report by relying on three controlled interviews. Look at what he did here in 2024: he attempts to undermine a major United Nations (OHCHR) report that accused both the military and the AA of targeted atrocities, intentional burning of Rohingya homes, and sexual violence.

To counter the UN, he uses the exact same trick: he embeds himself with the AA for six days, sits in an environment entirely monitored by them, and uses highly curated interviews to write a piece exonerating the Arakan Army.

Just like in 2026, Rajeev’s primary defence narrative for the AA in 2024 is to shift 100% of the blame for violence onto the junta and Rohingya militants (ARSA).

He quotes “captured” junta officers and “escaped Rohingya recruits” (who surrendered to the AA and are being held in AA custody) claiming they were ordered by the military to burn down Buddhist homes.

He presents testimony from people currently being detained by a rebel army as independent, uncoerced truth. He expects the reader to believe that a captured prisoner or a Rohingya man sitting in an AA-run police station is speaking completely freely.

Absolute Blindness to Retaliatory Arson

When confronted with satellite data and independent analysis from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). .which explicitly accused the Arakan Army of a “systematic campaign of retaliatory arson” against Rohingya neighbourhoods, Rajeev completely folds.

He interviews a Rohingya man named Husan Ahmed, whose house was torched the exact night the AA entered the town. When Ahmed clearly terrified, says it was “too dark” to see who did it, Rajeev notes that the man was “reeling under fear.”

Yet, instead of concluding that the man is terrified of the AA commanders standing nearby, Rajeev uncritically prints an AA coordinator’s claim that “drones or planes” did it, despite admitting the houses showed signs of being manually torched, not bombed. He then muses that if there were retaliatory attacks by the AA, “the victims have long since fled” - completely missing the irony that he is refusing to interview the refugees who fled because they are outside of the AA’s control.

The Arakan Army as Liberators

The final section of his 2024 piece reads like a direct PR pamphlet for the United League of Arakan (the political wing of the AA). He interviews the AA-appointed chief administrator, Aung Thaung Shwe, allowing him to spin a beautiful narrative about “equal rights,” “material support,” and “village security committees.”

He completely ignores the structural reality of ethnic cleansing, framing the mass displacement of 140,000+ people not as a humanitarian crisis driven by targeted violence, but as an orderly, benevolent “evacuation” managed by the AA to save lives.

Rajeev Bhattacharyya is an embedded reporter with systematic access granted by the Arakan Army. He didn’t just stumble into a bad methodology in 2026; he has spent years acting as the AA’s preferred international megaphone, systematically using small, captive sample sizes inside rebel territory to dismiss the findings of the UN, Human Rights Watch, and satellite forensic investigators.

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But timing, emphasis and political context matter. Fortify Rights’ intervention arrived at the exact moment when rare international attention had finally turned to the Arakan Army’s conduct as a de facto authority in Rakhine State. By shifting the spotlight to a detained and diminished Rohingya armed-group leader, the appeal risks creating a false symmetry between ARSA’s crimes and the AA’s present territorial power over Rohingya lives.

The piece also questions Fortify Rights’ use of anonymous “Rohingya-led organisations” as political validation, and the way Bangladesh is cast as a potential partner in justice despite its long history of securitising and manipulating the refugee camps where ARSA operated. My argument is simple - accountability for all perpetrators is necessary, but it can also become a convenient way to disperse/dilute pressure just when one powerful actor is finally facing scrutiny.

I also think Fortify Rights’ Leadership Council needs more scrutiny. I have written before about Irwin Cotler’s presence on that council and what it says about Fortify’s claim to universal accountability. Cotler is not just a former justice minister; he is also a figure long associated with defending Israel from sustained human rights scrutiny. So when Fortify uses its Leadership Council to add moral and legal weight to a politically fraught intervention, we should ask what kind of authority is being manufactured.

Read the full article here:

DVB OpEd

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A recent piece in The Diplomat by Rajeev Bhattacharyya attempts to cast doubt on a major Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigation into the horrific massacre at Htan Shauk Khan village in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Where HRW uncovered a systematic slaughter of over 170 Rohingya civilians, Bhattacharyya offers a revisionist narrative that conveniently washes the hands of the rebel Arakan Army (AA). But don't be fooled by the veneer of objective journalism - this isn't an independent investigation; it’s a masterclass in laundering rebel propaganda.

Let’s look at where the author is getting his “facts.” He relies entirely on interviews conducted smack in the middle of AA-controlled territory. The people he’s chatting to are sitting in “New Htan Shauk Khan,” not safely across the border in Bangladesh or anywhere outside the AA’s reach. That is a massive, gaping flaw. Survivors face outright coercion, restrictions, and intimidation. You can’t just rock up to a zone run by an armed group, ask the locals under their thumb if everything’s alright, and take their word as gospel. That is not a minor methodological issue with this article. It is a very large hole.

The village chief (Mohammad Juloddin) is an administrator running a village under AA rule. Expecting a village chief or local residents living under an armed rebel group to look a foreign journalist in the eye and say, “Yes, the people running this area massacred 170 of our neighbours” is laughably naive. If HRW says survivors face coercion, this is exactly what it looks like.

The sample size here is an absolute pittance. We are talking about exactly three residents. Three! And the author expects us to weigh that against HRW’s mountain of actual evidence, which includes extensive survivor testimony, named victim lists, satellite imagery, and forensic analysis. Pitting three monitored locals against a massive forensic data trail isn’t journalism. I don’t know what it is. Well, i do. It’s called copy pasting AA propaganda.

And then there is the blatant one-sided framing. The whole piece is AA-friendly. The author goes out of his way to foreground ARSA presence, alleged collaboration with the Myanmar military, forced conscription, and airstrikes. Why? Because every single one of these elements serves as a convenient shield to build up the AA’s defence narrative. It’s not an objective investigation; it’s a calculated attempt to shift the blame.

Rajeev Bhattacharyya’s narrative cleanly absolves the AA of any operational wrongdoing. It attributes 100% of the destruction to the Myanmar military’s airstrikes and chaos, perfectly aligning with the AA’s public defence that they are “liberating” the population from the junta.

Worst of all, the piece reproduces the toxic narrative that the people who fled to Bangladesh were mostly just ARSA functionaries, sympathisers, or military collaborators. This isn’t just a bad take; it’s a deeply consequential, malicious claim. By painting the refugees with that brush, the author conveniently delegitimises the exact witnesses who are most likely to blow the whistle on the AA’s own atrocities. It tells readers, in effect, that the people beyond the AA’s reach are suspect, while the people still living under AA control are reliable.

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Bhattacharya even posts a picture of himself sittingg next to his interviewees. This is an active, heavily surveilled conflict zone. Posting such an image is an absolute schoolboy error in investigative journalism. It breaches fundamental ethical and safety protocols on two major fronts:

Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights, and the UN have explicitly detailed how the Arakan Army has restricted, intimidated, and forced surviving Rohingya in these exact resettlement areas to provide false, exonerating testimony. By posing for a photo with the village chief and residents, Rajeev isn’t showing “transparency”; he is documenting the exact scene of the performance.

Those interviewees know that the moment Rajeev packs up his camera and leaves, they still have to live under the absolute rule of the AA. In that photograph, the subjects are essentially being asked to sign their names to a defence narrative with an armed group watching. Showing their faces in a high-stakes war crimes dispute is wildly irresponsible.

The photo functions as an AA Receipt. When independent investigative bodies like Myanmar Witness used satellite data and forensic imagery to geolocate the mass graves in Htan Shauk Khan, they explicitly documented the AA’s strategy. Their reports show that the AA has systematically organised tightly chaperoned media visits and staged interviews at these exact spots to counter the international fallout of the massacre.

By publishing that photo, Rajeev essentially signals that he walked right into a pre-packaged, heavily managed “red zone,” sat down with the administrators the AA put in place, and dutifully took notes. It transforms the journalist from an independent investigator into a prop. Pasting a photo of himself in the middle of it just proves he was happy to be part of the choreography.

The piece finishes with a completely hollow, pseudo-intellectual disclaimer about how “information is often tweaked, even weaponised, to create narratives.” The irony is staggering. Bhattacharyya is doing exactly what he warns against: weaponising a highly controlled, tiny sample size of state-monitored voices to create an AA-friendly narrative, all the while pretending to be an objective observer.

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In a video statement following his release, Ko Tinmaung, a Toronto-based Rohingya activist originally from Arakan, said he had joined the flotilla to help open a humanitarian corridor to Gaza. Instead, he said, he was taken into what he described as “Israeli detention” and subjected to violence that left him with visible injuries, taser marks, wounds from extremely tight handcuffs, and possible concussion.

Video: Rohingya activist Ko Tinmaung speaks after his release from Israeli detention, alleging beatings, tasering, racist abuse and severe mistreatment of detainees following Israel’s seizure of the Global Sumud Flotilla.

“The brutality that I experienced is indescribable,” he said.

Tinmaung alleged that he was taken into a dark room and beaten by more than five people. He said he was kicked, punched and tasered in several places on his body. He also described being handcuffed so tightly that the restraints cut into his wrists and restricted blood circulation.

He said he still needed medical treatment for concussion-like injuries.

But Ko Tinmaung insisted that what happened to him was only one part of a wider pattern of abuse against flotilla detainees. He said he saw other detained activists with broken ribs, head wounds, blood coming from their ears, eye injuries, broken noses and broken teeth. Most gravely, he alleged that there were 12 cases of sexual assault, including people being tasered on their genitals.

These are serious allegations of custodial abuse. They describe punishment, humiliation and violence inflicted on unarmed civilian activists after their capture.

Ko Tinmaung rejected Israel’s claim to be acting as a professional military or democratic state. “This level of brutality doesn’t come from a professional military,” he said. “It doesn’t come from the only democracy in the Middle East that they claim to be.”

Instead, he described Israel as a “pariah state” and accused it of operating through racist and supremacist violence.

A particularly disturbing part of Ko Tinmaung’s testimony concerned the racialised nature of the abuse he says he experienced. He said Israeli personnel repeatedly mocked him by calling him “Ahmed”, apparently assuming a Muslim identity from his appearance, and then assaulted him further. He said they looked at his skin colour, laughed at him, and treated his passport as worthless because he was brown.

“You live in a racist, supremacist Israeli society,” he said, describing the atmosphere around him in detention.

For Ko Tinmaung, the experience also reopened the memory of Rohingya suffering under Myanmar’s military and Buddhist nationalist violence. During detention, he said, he kept thinking about what Rohingya had endured in Arakan. He drew a direct connection between the treatment of Palestinians and Rohingya, saying extremists in Myanmar had previously spoken of learning from Israel in how to deal with a so-called “Muslim situation”.

His statement was also a refusal to present himself simply as a victim. Despite the injuries he described, Ko Tinmaung repeatedly turned attention back to Palestinians in Gaza, saying what he endured was “nothing” compared with what Palestinians face daily. The point of his testimony was not only to expose what happened in detention, but to insist that the violence had failed in its purpose.

“You cannot silence us by breaking us,” he said. “By breaking our bones, by beating us, by tasering us.”

His account raises urgent questions not only for Israel but also for Canada. Ko Tinmaung is based in Toronto and was among the Canadian participants detained after the flotilla was hijacked. His allegations require more than expressions of concern. They demand governmental follow-up, medical documentation, legal action, and public scrutiny of what Israeli forces did to civilian detainees after taking them into custody.

The allegation is stark - a Rohingya activist joined a humanitarian mission to Gaza and emerged from Israeli detention with taser marks, handcuff wounds and testimony of beatings, sexualised violence and racist abuse.

This should not disappear into the special vocabulary of evasion reserved for Israel - where abduction becomes “interception” and accountability is postponed until it no longer matters.

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My Dhaka Tribune article on the Rohingya Gen-Z movement was published today. It argues that something important has shifted inside the refugee camps. A new generation of Rohingya youth is publicly challenging entrenched power structures, intimidation, and the informal architecture of authority that has long shaped camp life.

Read Dhaka Tribune OpEd

Events since I wrote the article have only reinforced that argument.

On 5 May, Abdul Halim, an Arakan Rohingya Organisation (ARO) leader, was killed near Tarjar Bridge between Camp 7 and Camp 8 East. I have written separately about the deeper political context of that killing and the allegations now circulating around it. But one immediate consequence was striking. Shortly before Halim’s death, the Rohingya Committee for Peace and Repatriation (RCPR) had issued a statement presenting itself as the guardian of “peace, stability, unity, dignity,” insisting that it had maintained peace across the camps since September 2024.

Yet after the killing, the RCPR office closed and its leadership largely disappeared from public view. When visited recently, the office door was open, but only a few youths remained there, sitting idly inside.

The contrast is difficult to ignore. An organisation presenting itself as the stabilising structure of the camps appeared unable to maintain even its own organisational presence once violence escalated.

FIR: Abdul Halim

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FIR (First Information Report) documents relating to the killing of Abdul Halim name Dil Mohammed among the accused/suspects. Inclusion in an FIR is not proof of guilt, but it is politically significant given RCPR’s claims to represent “peace” and “stability” inside the camps.

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The picture has become even more complicated. Case documents relating to Abdul Halim’s killing name Dil Mohammed among the accused/suspects. The very figure around whom RCPR’s authority was organised is now reportedly drawn into the investigation of the killing. In other words, the issue is no longer only whether RCPR had legitimacy. It is whether the refugee camp order being assembled around Dil Mohammed was already collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Its authority depended less on deep community legitimacy than on a fragile arrangement of patronage, mediated leadership, and relationships with powerful actors surrounding camp governance.

There are also indications that the dynamics among the Bangladeshi agencies involved in refugee camp management may themselves be shifting. Multiple Rohingya sources distinguish between the roles of DGFI and NSI, often portraying them as operating with different approaches toward figures like Dil Mohammed and toward the wider camp order itself. Some Rohingya now speculate that recent events may reflect internal reshuffling or recalibration among the authorities. These claims remain difficult to independently verify. But, again, the perceptions themselves matter because they shape how many Rohingya now interpret power inside the camps.

Meanwhile, the pressure on Gen-Z activists has continued.

One of the prominent youth voices associated with the movement, Sahat Zia Hero, has now been named in a murder case which he strongly denies. In a letter sent to the RRRC office, he described the allegation as false and politically motivated. He argues that his inclusion in the case is part of a wider effort to intimidate youth activists who have spoken publicly about corruption, trafficking, violence, and protection failures inside the camps.

Sahat Zia says he has also written to the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva about his situation. After Mohammed Ullah reported threats to UNHCR and still ended up missing at sea, Rohingya youth are no longer treating local protection channels as sufficient. They are escalating outward, because the system that should have protected them has already failed once, with devastating consequences.

The charge against Sahat Zia resembles a familiar refugee camp dynamic in which outspoken individuals suddenly find themselves exposed to accusations, surveillance, or legal vulnerability after challenging powerful actors.

That is important because the Gen-Z campaign was never only about Mohammed Ullah. It was about who is permitted to speak, who is protected, who becomes vulnerable after speaking out, and whether Rohingya youth can act politically without becoming targets themselves.

The Dhaka Tribune piece argues that Mohammed Ullah’s death broke a long silence inside the camps. What has happened since makes that even clearer. The structures being challenged were not as strong or neutral as they claimed to be. They now look weaker, more politically managed, and more entangled in the very violence they said they were preventing.

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Kefayet Ullah, also known as Abdul Halim, an Arakan Rohingya Organisation (ARO) leader, was shot near Tarjar or Torjar Bridge between Camp 7 and Camp 8 East in Ukhiya on 5 May 2026. Two others, Mohammad Ullah and Nur Mohammad, were injured in the same attack. Police and APBn sources have said the attackers fled and that operations were launched to identify them. Some reports have attributed the killing to suspected Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) gunmen, while others have been more cautious, describing the attackers only as unidentified assailants.

But the killing should not be read simply as another episode of “refugee camp violence” or a routine contest for territorial control. The more important question is where Halim stood in the shifting order of armed groups, brokers, intelligence-linked intermediaries and refugee camp governance. In that sense, his killing appears to sit inside a longer history of Rohingya armed-group rivalry and, more importantly, inside the current struggle over who is permitted to exercise authority in the camps.

Halim had once worked within ARSA during the period when Abu Ammar Jununi was chief of the organisation. Abu Ammar, who led ARSA until his arrest, presided over a structure in which different operational areas in Arakan were reportedly divided between commanders. According to sources familiar with that background, Khalid, now the current chief of ARSA, operated in the north; Halim was associated with the middle zone; and Asaad with the south. The rivalry between Khalid and Halim, they say, began there, long before Halim’s death in Bangladesh. Khalid is alleged to have bullied Halim repeatedly and to have tried to eliminate him. In 2023, Halim was also reportedly shot by one of Khalid’s main men, Samudin, who is now in prison.

That history is important because it gives the killing a deeper political context. Halim was not merely a local refugee camp figure who suddenly became a target. He had a history inside ARSA, a history of conflict with its present leadership, and a later trajectory that placed him outside ARSA’s control. After coming to Bangladesh to lead camp operations in 2021, Halim was arrested by RAB. During his imprisonment, he reportedly complained about Khalid’s conduct in Arakan, but Abu Ammar did not act against Khalid. After Halim’s release in 2022, Abu Ammar called him back, but Khalid allegedly continued the same behaviour. Halim did not return to ARSA. He later joined the Arakan Rohingya Army (ARA), before eventually splitting away from Nobi Huson’s ARA to lead the Arakan Rohingya Organisation (ARO). (Confusingly, ARO was also once the political wing of the ARA).

This background helps explain why Halim’s killing cannot be reduced to a simple dispute between rival armed groups. The more politically sensitive claim from sources is that Halim was targeted because he did not fit the emerging expectations of refugee camp governance. In particular, Halim “did not accept Dil Mohammed.” That detail is important.

Dil Mohammed is not just another refugee camp name. I have reported on him at length. In brief, he is a controversial smuggler, broker and emerging power figure whose role has shifted from cross-border networks and military contacts to recruitment, armed mobilisation and public leadership theatre. In the camps, such figures matter because authority is not exercised only through formal institutions. It is also exercised through intermediaries, armed factions, intelligence-linked relationships, broker networks and carefully staged claims to community leadership.

In that context, Halim’s refusal to accept Dil Mohammed may have placed him outside the refugee camp order that is being assembled around armed groups, compliant intermediaries and intelligence-linked influence. This is the core issue. Halim may not have been killed simply because he was an ARO commander, or because of an old ARSA feud, or because of narcotics and extortion allegations. He may have become a problem because he refused to recognise the authority of a particular emerging arrangement inside the camps.

Sources also allege that the killing was preceded by an information campaign. According to these sources, DGFI and ARSA recently held a meeting, after which allegations were circulated through ARSA-linked pages and local news outlets accusing Halim of yaba dealing, kidnapping and extorting shops. That claim is significant because it challenges another version of events now circulating in the camps - that Halim was killed by drug lords or angry locals because of his violence, narcotics links and abuses against refugees.

The sources’ point is not that Halim was an innocent figure, or that allegations of violence, extortion or criminal activity should be dismissed. The more important claim is that these allegations may have been politically useful at a particular moment. It was amplified in a way that isolated and discredited him, and made his killing easier to explain afterwards - as if either inevitable or deserved.

The most serious allegation, then, is that DGFI used ARSA to kill Halim. That allegation cannot be independently verified and should be treated with caution. There is not enough evidence to conclude that DGFI ordered, planned or directed the killing. But the allegation itself is important because it reflects how many Rohingya now understand power in the camps - not as a simple conflict between armed groups, but as a murkier system in which armed factions, intelligence actors, brokers and camp-based leadership projects overlap.

Seen this way, Halim’s killing may have involved several layers at once, as mentioned above. There was the old rivalry with Khalid, now the chief of ARSA. There was Halim’s break from ARSA and later association with ARA and ARO. There was the contest for dominance in the camps. But there was also, according to sources, Halim’s refusal to accept Dil Mohammed and the wider camp order being built around him.

Halim’s killing, therefore, raises a larger question than who fired the shots near Tarjar Bridge. It raises the question of who is allowed to command or to mobilise, and who must submit to the informal architecture of refugee camp power. In that sense, the killing is not only about one armed commander’s death. It is about the violent policing of political obedience inside the refugee camps.

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My new Dhaka Tribune article makes one thing clear - this sinking was not a failure at sea. It was a failure on land. Bangladesh’s policy framework has constructed a system of containment rather than protection, where nearly 1.2 million Rohingya are confined to camps with restricted movement, no formal right to work, and shrinking aid. Within that system, leaving is not an aberration. It is a predictable outcome. When you remove lawful mobility, economic agency, and physical security, movement does not disappear. It becomes irregular, dangerous, and criminalised.

Read Dhaka Tribune OpED

The role of UNHCR in this ecosystem is no less troubling. Protection, in principle, is its core mandate. Yet here is a case where a refugee documented threats, named perpetrators, and formally requested intervention and still found no effective protection. The response, instead, reverts to familiar language about “protracted displacement” and “durable solutions.” That language may be institutionally convenient, but it obscures the immediate question - what does protection mean if it cannot function at the point where a refugee says, clearly, “I am not safe”?

Then there is the politics of diaspora commentary. Ro Nay San Lwin urges Rohingya not to take dangerous journeys and to struggle for “dignified return.” Additionally, he says not to trust traffickers. This is presented as advice. It is, in fact, a non-insight. Of course, traffickers cannot be trusted. That is precisely why their continued relevance demands explanation.

People do not board these boats because they believe traffickers are benevolent. They board them because the alternatives have been foreclosed. When movement is restricted, work is prohibited, aid is shrinking, and protection cannot be relied upon, the choice is not between safety and risk. It is between different forms of risk. In that context, warning people about traffickers does not address the problem. It avoids it.

No credible conditions for return exist. Rakhine remains unstable, fragmented, and unsafe. To tell people not to leave without confronting these realities is not leadership. It is distance speaking to confinement. It is not guidance. It is the repetition of the obvious while ignoring the conditions that make the obvious irrelevant.

So the script repeats. Blame the traffickers. Arrest a few intermediaries. Call it justice. Meanwhile, the underlying system remains intact - containment without rights, protection without enforcement, and advice without consequence. As long as that structure persists, boats will continue to leave. And each time they sink, the explanations will be ready but the causes will remain untouched.

Read the full story here.

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