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.

Share

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?”

Related Articles:

The Anti-Rohingya Turn in Malaysia’s Online Spaces

Shafiur Rahman

·

13 Jan

Content warning: This post contains racist and anti-refugee language (quoted for documentation), and references to incitement and violence.

Read full story

What Malaysia Isn’t Asking About Rohingya Boat Deaths

Shafiur Rahman

·

20 November 2025

New Podcast Episode

Listen now

Revisiting Malaysia’s “Respectable Deportations” of the Rohingya

Shafiur Rahman

·

17 November 2025

Reading recent Malaysian coverage of the Langkawi boat tragedy, I keep find…

Read full story

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Subscribe now

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

2.97MB ∙ PDF file

Download

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.

Download

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.

Share

Subscribe now

They are accused of spreading “fake information against the office of Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC).” The error regarding a general order to close Rohingya shops is obvious. The consequence is extraordinary. There is no indication of malicious intent by the youths. No instruction was given to them to correct the information. No warning. No engagement. Instead, the youths were arrested, charged, and sentenced.

In a functioning civil society, a factual error in a social media post is met with a correction or a "cease and desist." Moving straight to a one-month detention suggests the goal isn't to correct the record, but to deter reporting of any kind.

From Screenshot to Arrest

What happened next is more revealing than the arrest itself. According to information obtained from within the camps, the post did not simply circulate organically. A screenshot of it was reportedly forwarded to RRRC HQ by Khin Maung, one of the five rotating presidents of the United Council of Rohingya (UCR).

From there, the image was distributed through camp coordination networks. Rohingya members within those structures saw it. The discussion spread. Shortly afterwards, arrests followed.

The sequence matters. A piece of information moves through a structure, namely UCR, that is presented as community representation, enters administrative channels, and re-emerges as a criminal case!

I asked Khin Maung directly about his role in the arrests. He has not responded - a familiar silence for an individual who habitually avoids uncomfortable questions. The involvement of co-opted figures like Khin Maung in transmitting information to the RRRC blurs the line between community representation and administrative enforcement. Khin Maung has reportedly claimed he only shared the post for "confirmation," a convenient defence that masks his role as a catalyst for the arrests.

The involvement of a UCR official is not surprising. It is consistent with how the organisation has operated since its formation. The UCR was assembled through a tightly controlled process. A small voter base selected a larger congress, which in turn produced an executive committee and five rotating presidents. At every stage, the RRRC shaped participation, approved outcomes, and intervened in membership.

What Was Being Shared

The post that triggered the arrests referred to a real event. On Bhasan Char, an entire market had been shut down after electrical wires and a motor were stolen from a facility used by officials. There was no initial investigation and there was no attempt to isolate responsibility.

Instead, all Rohingya-run shops were ordered closed. Any violation would result in demolition and legal action.

Within 24 hours, the stolen items were reportedly recovered. Four individuals were arrested - two Rohingya and two Bangladeshi nationals. But the response had already done its work. Livelihoods were halted. A message had been sent. This was not policing by any stretch of the imagination. It was collective punishment.

The images shared by the two youths in Cox’s Bazar were taken from this incident. They did not invent the event. They misunderstood its location (where the order to shut shops applied). For that, they were jailed.

After the Closure

The story does not end with the reopening of the shops. In the days that followed, a new structure emerged on Bhasan Char. A 21-member “representative committee,” reportedly formed under RRRC direction. Its stated purpose was to prevent theft, eliminate drug trafficking, stop syndicates, and maintain social order.

But according to multiple accounts from residents, the composition of the committee raised immediate concerns. Teachers and educated individuals were largely excluded. Apart from a small number of “Rohingya market” figures, most members were drawn from a single “organised group” that had long sought to consolidate influence within the camps.

Some individuals reportedly have histories linked to the very activities the committee claims to address. The committee has not remained symbolic. Its members are conducting patrols, accompanied by additional individuals acting as enforcers. They move in a coordinated fashion. Residents report intimidation, surveillance, and fear.

There are concerns that the structure may be used to settle personal disputes, target individuals, and consolidate power through coercion. Even more striking is the ambiguity around its authority. Residents report that the committee may not have been formally approved by the CiC, or at least not in its current composition. It appears to have emerged in the space between official instruction and informal enforcement.

This is where governance becomes most opaque.

A System, Not an Incident

Taken together, these events form a pattern. A collective punishment is imposed without due process. Images of that punishment circulate. Those who share them are identified and arrested. Posts of my original article in Bhasan Char WhatsApp groups are removed.

The suppression of information is coordinated across both digital and physical spaces. This pattern is not isolated. In June 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Rohingya refugees detained in Cox’s Bazar were questioned about their links to my work, with some shown my photograph by security officials. The concern is not personal. It is structural. Information, and those associated with it, are being tracked.

Two other things to note:

A leadership structure presented as representative of Rohingya appears to facilitate the flow of information upwards …to RRRC HQ.

A new enforcement body emerges on the ground in Bhasan Char, operating with unclear authority and generating fear.

At each stage, the same logic applies - control without accountability.

The Rohingya are excluded from formal legal systems. There are no independent courts. No effective complaint mechanisms exist. Authority is concentrated in administrative offices, exercised through intermediaries, and enforced through both formal and informal means. When there are no independent courts or complaint mechanisms, "law" is whatever the person in power says it is at that moment.

In such a system, punishment does not need to be proportionate. Nor does it need to be evidence-based. Anything or anybody that escapes control is liable to be punished.

The Question That Remains

The question is no longer whether a mistake was made. The question is what kind of system responds to a mistake in this way and who, within that system, is empowered to turn information into a crime.

The two youths in Cox’s Bazar were not organising protests. They were not inciting violence or fabricating events. They shared images of something that had happened. I repeat again, they got the location wrong. For that, they were arrested, charged, and jailed.

When the cost of a mistake is jail time, the community stops sharing information altogether. This creates an information vacuum that authorities can fill with their own state-sanctioned narratives.

The role of the United Council of Rohingya (UCR) in this sequence is particularly concerning. If a "representative" (Khin Maung) is the one funnelling social media screenshots to the RRRC HQ, the organisation is not acting as a bridge for community needs, but as a vertical extension of the authoritarian RRRC. This turns community “representatives” into informants. It breaks the social fabric of the camps, as residents can no longer trust their own “elected” or appointed representatives.

In sum, this isn't just about two youths and a Facebook post. It is a description of an authoritarian ecosystem where information is treated as a weapon, and the marginalised are denied the basic human right to be wrong without being imprisoned. From Bhasan Char to Cox’s Bazar, a mobile court sentence for a social media post reveals the brutal reality of the CiC’s unchecked "Legal Apartheid."

Share

Read more about UCR here

Subscribe now

Dil Mohammed, a Rohingya community leader, was seized in Bangladesh in January 2023. For four months, he was held in secret, without access to family or lawyers. In August 2025 (and published November 2025), the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that this amounted to an enforced disappearance involving Bangladeshi security agencies, including RAB and DGFI.

In August 2024, Bangladesh establishes a commission to investigate enforced disappearances with a mandate covering “all cases” carried out by state agencies since 2010. On paper, the case fits squarely within that remit.

And yet, when the commission’s findings emerge, there is no trace of it.

His son says he raised the case directly with a commissioner, only to be told not to pursue the matter, and later met with silence even after the UN decision was formally shared.

At the same time, other Rohingya detainees linked to the “No Man’s Land” incident describe months of secret detention and torture in facilities known as “Ayna Ghor,” suggesting this may not have been an isolated case.

In my latest piece for Dhaka Tribune, I examine how the case of Dil Mohammed appears to have been omitted despite the UN ruling being communicated to the authorities and what this reveals about the limits of accountability when the victims are Rohingya.

Read the full article:

Dhaka Tribune

See also:

Further Reading:

1. UN Declares Detention of Rohingya Leader Aribitrary

2. Landmark UN ruling demands Bangladesh free detained Rohingya leader Dil Mohammed.

3. International Spotlight on Bangladesh as Rohingya Leader’s Case Heads to the UN

4. The Disappearance and Arbitrary Detention of Rohingya Refugee Leader Dil Mohammed

5. The Disappearance of Dil Mohammed: A Voice for the Rohingya Silenced

6. Myanmar Bangladesh joint offensive cracks down on Rohingya

An audio message circulated by CMO (care maintenance officer) Faisal, a junior camp-level official, relayed what was described as an “urgent order” from the CiC office.

All Rohingya shops and businesses in Cluster 05, including Market No. 19 and smaller shops across nearby clusters, were to be shut down indefinitely.

The reason: a theft.

Electrical wires and a motor had been stolen from a shelter used by CiC office staff. Until the items were recovered, all Rohingya-run businesses were to remain closed. Any shop that opened in violation of the order would be demolished immediately, with further legal action to follow.

There was no investigation at this stage. No named suspects. No attempt to distinguish between individuals and the wider community.

Instead, an entire population was punished. This cannot be described as policing. It is collective punishment.

Within 24 hours, the stolen items were reportedly recovered. Four individuals were apprehended: two Rohingya and two Bangladeshi nationals.

But even here, the asymmetry of power was visible. Images of the two Rohingya suspects were circulated in internal WhatsApp groups of “Head focals.” The Bangladeshi suspects were not. The Bangladeshis will likely enter the formal criminal justice system (police, courts, lawyers), while the Rohingya are trapped in the "system of exception" (CiC's whim, mobile courts, or arbitrary beating).

The initial order, however, had already done its work. Shops had been shuttered. Livelihoods were halted and a message sent.

The audio message relaying the order was circulated by CMO Faisal, a camp-level official, as I wrote above. This detail matters. By using a junior official to transmit “urgent orders,” the CiC’s office maintains a layer of distance, while enforcement is carried out through intermediaries. Responsibility becomes diffuse, but authority remains intact. I have previously reported on Faisal’s role in camp governance, including allegations from residents that he has been influential in shaping harsh enforcement practices on the island.

The logic is clear. When authority is concentrated in a single administrative office, and when those subject to that authority have no access to courts or independent complaint mechanisms, punishment becomes discretionary. It does not need to be proportionate or individualised. It does not even need to follow evidence! It only needs to be enforced.

For Rohingya on Bhasan Char, this is not an isolated incident but part of a wider pattern. During relocation from Cox’s Bazar, refugees were promised the ability to run businesses, raise livestock, and live with a degree of economic autonomy. These assurances were central to persuading many to move.

The reality has diverged sharply.

In a message circulated after the incident, one Rohingya resident described the decision as “unjust and unfair,” noting that the authorities had imposed collective punishment despite the fact that such thefts are rarely confined to Rohingya alone and often involve actors beyond the camps. The response, however, treated the entire Rohingya community as responsible.

There is a deeper issue here. The theft itself reportedly took place within a facility used by officials. That raises obvious questions about security and oversight. Yet the response was not to examine institutional failure (namely, Bangladeshi guards) but to impose sanctions on the refugee population.

This inversion, where those with the least power bear the greatest consequences, is not incidental. It is clear that it is built into the governance structure of Bhasan Char.

The CiC office exercises sweeping authority over movement, markets, dispute resolution, policing and discipline. There are no meaningful checks on this power from courts or independent bodies. In such a system, collective punishment is not an aberration. It is a tool. See this article of mine published recently in Dhaka Tribune.

The language of “management” and “security” is often used to describe how the island is run. But incidents like this reveal something else - a system in which an entire community can be penalised for the alleged actions of a few, without due process and without recourse. When a market is closed because of stolen wire, the island isn’t a “housing project”; it’s a high-security prison.

Finally, the silence of international humanitarian partners - UNHCR, BRAC etc - in the face of such blatant collective punishment is a dereliction of their protection mandate. It transforms their presence on the island from a safeguard into a silent endorsement of the CiC’s unchecked authority.

Related Reading:

Who Rules at the Camps
Dhaka Tribune (December, 2025)

Unravelling Bhasan Char: Bangladesh’s island for Rohingya refugees
DVB English (December, 2025)

Shut Down Bhasan Char Now
Counterpoint (June, 2025)

Bangladesh’s Island Warehouse for Rohingya Refugees
Failed Architecture (April, 2025)

Share

Subscribe now

Eid arrives in the camps, and it is marked, observed, and adapted.

Children wear new clothes where they can. Decorations appear along bamboo frames and tarpaulin walls. Families visit graves.

These are not scenes of normal life. But they are not reducible to crisis either. For a moment, the camps hold something else - ritual, memory, and the insistence on continuity. Even here.

Eid in the camps is one of those moments where the 'bare life' narrative of Giorgio Agamben reaches its limit- people are not just victims; they are remembering, mourning, dressing up, performing normality under constraint. The camps are intended as 'bare life,' but they fail to remain so. The state may try to strip these people down to mere biological existence but the act of "dressing up" is a radical political middle finger.

There are no rags here in the image above - only care, colour, and deliberate presentation. The conditions are impoverished. The life within them is not reducible to that. Many people carry an unspoken expectation that refugees should look visibly deprived at all times. These images disrupt that, and the disruption is not cosmetic. It is political.

The dominant imagery associated with camps is, of course, queues, malnutrition, mud and desperation. And at times, arrested Rohingya paraded under armed guard. But life does not organise itself so narrowly. It spills outward into ritual, into decoration, into the insistence on marking time.

At the same time, calling all this an example of “resilience” is a trap. It turns a political failure into a personal compliment, praising people for their endurance instead of asking why they are being crushed in the first place.

“Resilience” is comfortable for systems of management. Because if people are resilient, then reduced rations, restricted movement, and suspended futures can all be absorbed into a narrative of endurance.

When we use that word, we stop looking at the walls of the camp and start looking at the smiles of the victims, and we make their survival feel like a heartwarming story rather than a systemic crime.

These photos do not show people "bouncing back"; there is no "back" to go to. It is continuity under constraint. These rituals aren't about hope. They are about the refusal to be erased. People maintain their social lives not because they are "tough," but because life demands organisation even in a cage. To call it "resilience" is to offer a sedative that masks a crime. Calling it "continuity" keeps the machinery of injustice in plain sight.

The camps are designed to contain a people.
But even here, their sense of the world is not contained.

Leave a comment

Share

Read Article

It looks at how Rohingya refugees themselves are interpreting Bangladesh’s new government - not through official statements, but through lived experience in the camps.

Speaking to refugees across very different positions, from those who fled multiple times, to those embedded in camp governance structures, to individuals connected to armed networks, the piece shows how hope, fear and strategy coexist.

What emerges is not a single “community view,” but a fragmented political landscape:

• Some hope for expanded rights while in exile.

• Some fear a return to earlier cycles of coercive repatriation.

• Some are already recalculating in light of Bangladesh’s engagement with the Arakan Army.

• Others are thinking through the implications of the ICJ case and how even “victory” could be used to accelerate return.

Set against this, diaspora statements present a far more unified and optimistic picture often invoking 1978 and 1992 as precedents. A similar tone is reflected in parts of the internal Rohingya leadership structures facilitated and curated by Bangladesh’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC), including the United Council of Rohingya (UCR).

After publication, I realised I had omitted a relevant perspective from within that structure. One of UCR’s presidents, Khin Maung, told me:

“I have optimism about the next government. It depends on our engagement with them. They have a success story on Rohingya refugee repatriation.”

While diaspora organisations and Khin Maung invoke past “successful” repatriations, many refugees recall those same moments very differently. As always, the reality on the ground is more fragmented and more politically aware than is often assumed.

Read here:

Read Article

Related Reading:

The Rohingya are perennial pawns in Bangladesh’s politics

My essay on the myth of Rohingya “aid dependency” has also been republished by Counterpoint BD. It challenges not just a lazy narrative, but one that serves institutional interests - showing how refugees work, trade and survive despite heavy restrictions. What is framed as dependency is actively produced, structured and maintained.

Share

The Doctor on the Motorbike: The Legacy of Cato Aall

Long before the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar became a permanent fixture of global headlines, there were individuals inside the humanitarian system who saw what was happening and refused to look away.

One of them was Cato Aall, a Norwegian physician and nutrition scientist who travelled between the refugee camps during the 1978 Rohingya crisis on a small motorbike, measuring rations, mortality rates, and the unfolding nutritional collapse.

What he documented was startling. Refugees were receiving barely enough calories to survive. While many officials preferred reassuring language about aid provision, Aall warned bluntly that the camps were drifting toward what he called an “artificial famine-like condition.”

In a humanitarian system often constrained by political sensitivities, Aall did something rare - he insisted that science, the simple arithmetic of calories and survival, could not be ignored.

The article draws on archival material, contemporaneous reports from the 1978 refugee crisis, and interviews conducted more recently with people familiar with Aall’s work. It revisits Aall’s warnings and asks what they reveal about the long history of Rohingya aid policies and how debates about rations, assistance, and control continue to echo today.

The article also argues that Cato Aall deserves to be remembered as one of the earliest voices to document, with clarity and courage, the human cost of Rohingya displacement.

When Disappearances Disappear: The Case of Dil Mohammed

Bangladesh’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances was hailed as a landmark step toward accountability for the abuses of the previous era. However, for the Rohingya community, the promise of justice remains a hollow echo.

For many families, the commission represented a rare chance that long-ignored cases might finally receive official scrutiny.

But one disappearance stands out for its absence.

Dil Mohammed, a Rohingya community leader, was detained in circumstances that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention later characterised as an enforced disappearance involving Bangladeshi security agencies. The UN ruling was formally communicated to the authorities.

Yet when the commission published its final report, Dil Mohammed’s case did not appear.

The forthcoming piece examines how a case already recognised at the international level appears to have slipped through the gaps of a national inquiry. Through interviews with legal experts, commissioners, and the family, it asks a simple but troubling question:

How does a disappearance disappear from the record?

Taken together, these two stories sadly speak to a recurring problem in the history of the Rohingya crisis. That is how evidence is produced, ignored, rediscovered, or sometimes quietly omitted!

In 1978, Cato Aall insisted that the basic science of human survival could not be wished away. Fifty years later, questions remain about how certain Rohingya cases are recorded, or not recorded, within official investigations. Both pieces look at what happens when uncomfortable facts meet institutional reluctance.

Both of these articles will be landing in your inbox soon. If you haven't already, ensure you are a subscriber to get the stories as soon as they go live.

Video used with permission.

Here is what the individual using the loudhailer is saying:

”One of the main reasons why food assistance in the camps has dropped from $12 to $8 and later to $7 is the buying and selling of ration food by some individuals.

Those who are selling food and those who are buying it have, through these activities, created a major negative impact on the food assistance received by the entire Rohingya community living in the camps.

Today, RRRC representative Mizanur Rahman visited the camp and stated that NGO workers and government officials have collected various photos and information about individuals involved in buying and selling rations and have sent them to higher authorities.

Based on this information, it is being assumed that around 80% of people supposedly do not need food assistance. As a result, there is now a risk that around 80% of food assistance could be reduced in the future.

Everyone is therefore being strictly warned about this issue. If anyone is caught selling food, religious scholars (ulema) and responsible community members will confiscate that food.

If rations are seen being sold openly on the streets or in public places, they will be collected immediately and handed over to the WFP (World Food Programme). Photos and information about people involved in ration trading have already been collected.

Because of the actions of a few individuals, hundreds of people are now facing danger and difficulties. From today onwards, if anyone in Nayapara Registered Camp is caught selling food, that food will be taken and submitted directly to WFP, and authorities will be informed that the person concerned does not require food assistance.

If necessary, a recommendation will be made to completely stop their food assistance. From today, ordinary residents, religious scholars, and the youth are being called upon to work together to prevent this activity.

Those who are buying and selling rations openly on the roads are requested to please stop this activity immediately. About 20 years ago, ration trading existed only on a very limited scale - for example, if someone needed 1 kg or 2 kg, they would privately exchange it near their homes. But now entire sacks of food are being sold openly on the roads, which is completely against the rules.

Previously, some food sacks marked with the American aid logo were found to have reached Myanmar, and NGO and government officials received reports about this. This created the perception that Rohingya were smuggling aid food elsewhere. As a result, food sacks with the American flag marking were stopped from being supplied.

Insha’Allah, we will all work together to stop such activities. No one - no matter how influential they are - will be allowed to sell food. Shops located along the roads must also refrain from selling such food. If anyone wants to do business, they must do so according to the rules set for the camp.

Similarly, action will also be taken against those buying and selling gas (LPG). If anyone sells food or LPG provided by WFP or the United Nations, strict action will be taken against them. Everyone is once again warned - please refrain from such activities.”

So let’s break that down.

For years, international agencies and officials have repeated that Rohingya refugees are “fully dependent on aid.” Yet this announcement from a loudhailer in Teknaf acknowledges something quite different - a functioning market inside the camps. People are selling rations, others are buying them, shops are trading food, and entire sacks are reportedly appearing on the road.

This should not be surprising. Refugees are denied legal work and freedom of movement, yet they still need cash to meet everyday needs that rations do not cover — medicine, transport, phone data, and other basic expenses. Informal markets inevitably emerge in such conditions. It happens in almost every refugee setting from Jordan to Kenya. When they do, authorities often treat them as violations rather than as evidence of an economy struggling to function under extreme restrictions.

The result is a familiar cycle. Dependency is imposed, survival strategies emerge, and those strategies are then punished as abuse of aid.

The announcement mentions that “80% of people supposedly do not need food assistance” based on the fact that trading exists. This is a classic case of misinterpreting data. The Authority’s Logic: They are selling it, so they have too much. The Human Logic: I am hungry, but my child is sick and I need cash for medicines more than I need this extra kilo of rice.

Seen in this light, the loudhailer message is less about food trading than about disciplining the informal economy of the camps. It attempts to reassert a model in which refugees are expected to consume aid passively, even though the realities of camp life make that impossible.

And that is precisely the contradiction explored in my recent essay - a system that describes refugees as dependent while simultaneously suppressing the economic activities that allow them to survive.

Another striking feature of the announcement is the call for ulema, community leaders, youth and ordinary residents to monitor ration trading and confiscate food. In other words, refugees are being asked to inform on one another and seize food from neighbours who are simply trying to survive. The message makes clear that photos of suspected traders have already been collected and that anyone caught selling rations may have their assistance stopped entirely. What is presented as community responsibility is, in practice, a system of intimidation in which the authorities and aid system push the burden of enforcement onto the refugees themselves.

And one can easily see RRRC Chief Mizanur Rahman’s imprint here - the frustration of the $12-to-$7 ration cut is redirected away from the providers and toward fellow refugees.

You can read my essay here:

Creshendo

How the Aid Industry Turned Rohingya Survival into a Business Model

This month’s guest author Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker focusing on the politics of refugee management in South and Southeast Asia. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter…

Read more

3 months ago · Shafiur Rahman and Creshendo

My article takes that premise and applies it to a difficult reality. Nearly nine years after fleeing genocide, one million-plus Rohingya refugees remain confined to camps where legal work, mobility, and economic integration are tightly restricted.

In that time, the humanitarian system has normalised a model of managed dependency. As WFP now introduces tiered food rations, the contradiction becomes clearer - refugees are described as “100 per cent dependent,” yet the system quietly assumes they are already coping through informal work and remittances. The piece argues that dependency in the Rohingya camps is not a natural condition - it is a policy choice.

The essay draws on a growing body of research that complicates the narrative of total dependency. Surveys by Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Refugee Council have long found that large numbers of Rohingya refugees work informally in and around the camps despite formal prohibitions. More recently, the World Bank and UNHCR’s labour market study “Two Settlements, Two Diverging Paths” shows that roughly one-third of working-age Rohingya had worked in the previous year. A policy brief by Mohammad Salehin and Mizanur Rahman for the Peace Research Institute Oslo also outlines practical ways regulated camp-based livelihoods could reduce aid dependency without creating major “pull factors.”

Check it out.

But the images themselves tell another story.

In one widely shared photograph, dozens of men sit inside the meeting venue listening to speeches. Outside, along the edge of the building, a group of Rohingya women sit in a row of plastic chairs under the trees. They appear to have been invited to attend the meeting but were not given space inside. They are also seated perpendicular to the meeting, not facing it.

The contrast is difficult to miss. The discussion about the future of an entire people takes place indoors, while the women sit outside.

One Rohingya youth, Mohammed Fahad Ali, posted a blunt comment beneath the image:

“If you cannot provide them enough space inside, why did you call them to attend the meeting? The whole world gives women a front seat in meetings and conferences. What kind of behavior is this?”

The photograph of the women later disappeared from the UCR page. I asked Khin Maung, one of the presidents of UCR what this was all about. He has not answered as yet.

Deleting the comments

The complaints did not stop there.

Several Rohingya who attempted to question the organisation in the comment section say their remarks were removed. One commenter wrote:

“UCR deletes if you mention the truth.”

He said he had suggested improvements and asked questions about the meeting, but his comment was deleted instead of answered.

For some observers, the issue is not simply about one meeting or one photograph. It raises a larger question - how an organisation claiming to represent more than a million Rohingya handles criticism from its own community.

“If we cannot give suggestions or speak honestly,” the commenter wrote, “who gave them the authority to represent 1.2 million Rohingya people?”

UCR signs off its statements with the slogan “For Unity, Accountability, and Community Strength.” For many Rohingya observers, the question remains who exactly is being unified, who is accountable to whom, and where the community sits in that arrangement.

The familiar pattern of camp politics

Another criticism relates to the selection process for representatives. According to community members, UCR asked block-level leaders, known as majhis, to nominate five individuals from each block.

But some refugees say the process quickly reproduced the same problems that already exist in camp governance.

In Camp-5, community members reported that certain majhis selected relatives, sons and close associates instead of holding a broader consultation.

One Rohingya woman, Alisha Noor Aziz, wrote publicly to the UCR leadership asking them to review the process:

“Many vulnerable families feel they were not given a fair opportunity and that power is being misused.”

The complaint echoes a familiar criticism of camp governance structures - that is, representation often circulates within small networks of influence rather than emerging from open community participation.

Meetings without results

Others have raised a more fundamental question - what do these meetings actually achieve.

One Rohingya commentator put it bluntly:

“Years continue to pass, meetings increase, but meaningful results are rarely seen.”

Photos are taken. Statements are issued. Speeches are delivered. But for ordinary refugees, daily life in the camps remains largely unchanged.

The criticism reflects a growing frustration inside the camps. Many Rohingya say they see a constant stream of gatherings in the name of advocacy, consultation or coordination, yet very little visible progress on the issues that matter most to them - protection, rights, and a credible path to return.

Representation or performance?

The controversy also touches on a deeper question about the role of organisations like UCR inside the humanitarian system.

In earlier reporting, I noted how UCR leaders publicly supported changes introduced by Camp-in-Charge officials, including the replacement of the traditional majhi system with small committees selected by the authorities. You can read that post here:

At the time, UCR joint president, Khin Maung, praised the initiative and promised to support its implementation across the camps.

That language sounded less like independent community representation and more like an organisation helping to legitimise administrative decisions already made by the authorities. (After I asked Khin Maung if it will further concentrate power - he deleted his post…notice the pattern?)

The latest meeting photos, and the complaints that followed them, reinforce a similar impression. The meetings are well organised. The gilets and banners are printed. The speeches are delivered. The photographs circulate.

But for many Rohingya watching from the camps or, in the case of the women in the photograph, from just outside the meeting hall, the exercise increasingly looks less like representation and more like performance.

More about UCR HERE.