Bangladesh Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman's description of how the Awami League handled the Rohingya crisis is spot on. He calls it a load of "show-off" activities that achieved nothing useful for the Rohingya and only prolonged their suffering. He believes the Bangladesh Nationalist Party government he serves in is taking a different approach and will resolve the crisis.

He then went off to New York with his boss, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman. Tarique sprang a five-point Rohingya plan on the unsuspecting dignitaries at the 81st UNGA. And guess what? It is more of the same. He even opened with a revisionist history lesson.

Read my OpEd HERE.

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On 2nd October, I received an email from Shwe Maung, Chairperson of the Arakan Rohingya National Congress and former Member of Parliament (2010 – 2015) for Buthidaung Township, Arakan State, Myanmar.

It was a strange email. His media release is a plea to the Malaysian government, basically capitulating on behalf of Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani, the Rohingya human rights defender in Malaysia who has recently been charged under Malaysia’s Societies Act 1966 in connection with an unregistered organisation.

Shwe Maung does not challenge the absurdity or proportionality of the prosecution case. He does not ask why a long-established Rohingya activist is suddenly being criminalised for running an “unregistered” organisation. Nor does he demand that the charges be dropped. There is no defence of Zafar’s right to continue doing the work he has done publicly for decades - in the course of which he crossed paths with three Malaysian Prime Ministers, many ministers and other dignitaries. He does not ask why MERHROM’s public advocacy was tolerated for years if it was such a crime. He does not pushback against the state suddenly treating that work as criminal.

Instead, Shwe Maung carefully genuflects to Malaysian law and the judicial “process,” if it can be called that, then skips straight to some pathetic pleading - please don’t deport him to Myanmar; if Malaysia won’t keep him, let UNHCR find another country. Shwe Maung would rather that the central injustice is left untouched and, in Zafar’s case, makes banishment sound like an acceptable solution to prosecution.

Meanwhile, the man himself, Zafar, has pleaded not guilty and presumably intends to fight the case!

That is the same pattern I observed in the 2020 statement of a couple of Rohingya organisations I recently found: be deferential, reassure the government, praise and thank the government, avoid confrontation, and seek protection through accommodation. Take a look at the statement:

You will see that RWDN and ELOM bend over backwards to reassure Malaysians. The statement was signed by two very high profile Rohingya activists - Sharifah Shakirah and Sujauddin Karimuddin. Let me summarise the statement briefly - Rohingya do not want citizenship, they do not want rights beyond what Malaysian law permits, they have no intention of settling permanently, they are grateful guests, they respect the law, they pray for Malaysia’s wellbeing. They even go out of their way to distance themselves from Zafar, calling him a “self-proclaimed leader” and stressing that he is not an elected representative of the Rohingya community.

The striking thing is that, based on the contemporary record, Zafar does not appear to have actually done the thing for which those organisations were distancing themselves from him.

The immediate trigger was 21 April 2020, in the middle of the Covid lockdown and a furious Malaysian backlash after the navy had turned away a boat carrying Rohingya. MERHROM issued a statement calling on the UN, ASEAN and world leaders to protect Rohingya and act against human traffickers. According to a later communication by four UN Special Rapporteurs, an unknown Facebook account then circulated the statement while urging Malaysians to attack Zafar online; another account posted his photograph and falsely claimed that he was demanding full Malaysian citizenship for Rohingya. His contact details circulated and his Facebook account was inundated with roughly 20,000 comments, threats and abuse.

The claims metastasised very quickly. Posts attacking Zafar went viral. They alleged that Zafar had said Malays were “stupid,” demanded equal rights, full citizenship, and criticised Malaysia for refusing Rohingya boats permission to land. He had even broken Covid rules according to the allegations. (Notice, the false claim that he had demanded citizenship circulates to this day along with other fanciful allegations).

Zafar publicly denied every one of those allegations on 24 April. Contemporary reporting by Malaysiakini and FMT treated the citizenship posts as fake or falsely attributed to him. Reuters later described the episode straightforwardly as misinformation that he had demanded citizenship.

There was some real advocacy behind the distortion. MERHROM had previously written to Malaysia’s Human Resources Minister about the position of working Rohingya. It sought things such as permission to work, employer-provided insurance, more affordable medical treatment and humanitarian treatment rather than detention of working refugees. Those demands were subsequently circulated online as though MERHROM had produced a much more sweeping list, including the false Malaysian citizenship demand.

(In fact, Zafar had been focussed on advocacy for his people right from the start. I found a report from 2008, when he wrote to the Badawi government (Zafar met him personally) and asked him to cease the arrest and detention of refugees seeking protection, release refugees currently held in detention centres across the country, grant refugees temporary legal documentation so they could reside in Malaysia legally and halt the dangerous use of tear gas against refugees at the Thai border).

And then came the distancing. On 26 April, the RWDN/ELOM statement you see above actually acknowledges that Zafar had denied demanding citizenship and equal rights, but immediately says that he is not an elected representative or “ambassador” of Rohingya in Malaysia. A separate coalition of 17 Rohingya organisations went further, saying he was not their leader and apologising to Malaysia for statements attributed to him. Indeed, they wanted the authorities to take action.

That makes the episode considerably uglier. They were not distancing themselves from some documented outrageous demand Zafar had made. They were distancing themselves from a man caught in a xenophobic misinformation storm. The Rohingya organisations were clearly terrified of the backlash - understandably so - and their statements were essentially saying: we don’t want citizenship, we don’t want equal rights, we know we are guests, we are grateful to Malaysia, and this man, Zafar, does not speak for us.

The bitter part is what happened to Zafar. The falsehood did not disappear because other Rohingya organisations appeased the mob. He and his family received death threats; his children stopped attending school; MERHROM suspended aid work; and Reuters found him still effectively confined to his house a year later because he was frightened to go outside.

At the height of an anti-Rohingya panic, Zafar became the designated bad Rohingya. Other Rohingya organisations tried to establish themselves as the good Rohingya by disowning him, even though the explosive claims against him were false. Six years later, Malaysia is prosecuting the man they sacrificed. Six years later, the Malaysian state is finishing what the mob started.

If you are unsure why the charges are absurd, read my piece here below. Very briefly, charging Zafar under Sections 42 and 48 of the Societies Act 1966 for running an “unregistered” organisation amounts to administrative fiction. Malaysia does not permit non-citizens or stateless refugees to register societies in the first place. The state is criminalising him for failing to obtain a status it legally bars him from acquiring!

There is a deeper problem here. In Rohingya politics, deference to power has become an institutional instinct. We see it in the careful accommodation of the NUG, in Rohingya organisations praising powerful political actors, in refugee camp bodies shaped around what authorities will permit, and in some cases curated by the authorities. We also see diaspora groups forever grateful to governments and forever calibrating their language so as not to offend the governments/UN organisations who control access or recognition. The logic is understandable - a stateless people learn very quickly that survival often depends on staying in the good books of these powerful outfits.

But what goes down when that survival instinct hardens into a political culture? And then the question is no longer simply why Rohingya organisations so often kowtow to power. The Rohingya who challenges power openly can find himself/herself isolated not only by the state, but by his/her own community’s institutions. Perhaps that is the most corrosive consequence of prolonged powerlessness.

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Malaysia’s Societies Act 1966 says an organisation that should be registered but is not registered is an “unlawful society.” Section 42 then makes it an offence to be an office-holder or to manage or assist in managing it, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment or RM15,000. Section 48 criminalises acting on behalf of or representing such a society. This again carries up to five years. That is what Zafar is being prosecuted under.

There is a rather nasty Catch-22 here.

Zafar is not simply an undocumented man who invented an organisation yesterday. UN special rapporteurs recorded in 2021 that he sought refuge in Malaysia in 1992. He was recognised as a refugee in 2004. MERHROM says it was founded in 1998 and has operated publicly for decades. Yet now he has been charged because MERHROM is not registered and because he describes himself as its president. The RoS also says its investigation specifically examined MERHROM’s social-media statements and publications.

That is direct retaliation because MERHROM has recently been publicly criticising Malaysia's Rohingya policy. In June asking Anwar Ibrahim and ASEAN to secure safe return, in July opposing the proposed return of 5,000 Rohingya, and speaking publicly about Rohingya evictions. So the timing of Zafar’s arrest can’t be ignored.

The crucial thing is that refugee-led Rohingya organisations appear unable, or at the very least extraordinarily unlikely, to obtain normal legal recognition in Malaysia. How do we know this? A 2022 peer-reviewed study in Refugee Survey Quarterly found that UNHCR recognised more than 25 Rohingya refugee community organisations in Malaysia. None of those refugee-run organisations or learning centres was registered or licensed by the Malaysian authorities. The registered learning centres it found were instead operated by Malaysian NGOs. MERHROM itself has been saying publicly since at least 2019–20 that it “cannot be registered as an organization in Malaysia”, which it says has also prevented it from receiving normal organisational funding.

There is an even more revealing statement from the Malaysian government itself. In 2020, then Home Minister Hamzah Zainudin said the authorities had never registered a Rohingya association in Malaysia. He described associations representing Rohingya as illegal under the Societies Act. That is what is now being used against Zafar.

What makes this especially important is that the Societies Act itself does not simply say “foreigners cannot form associations”. The Registrar’s own current guidance says non-citizens may belong to societies, depending on the constitution, and may serve as office-bearers with the Registrar’s prior permission. It even explicitly permits new societies established by foreign “expatriates”, giving Korean and Japanese associations as examples.

But refugees occupy a very different legal layer. The lowest rung of all. Malaysia has no general statutory refugee status. Malaysian immigration law generally does not distinguish refugees from undocumented migrants. Zafar therefore isn’t in the comfortable category contemplated by the RoS guidance - a Japanese executive or Korean expatriate lawfully resident in Malaysia asking permission to head an expatriate association.

Malaysia is prosecuting a Rohingya refugee for representing an “unlawful society”, when “unlawful” in this case means unregistered. Yet, as we know, refugee-led Rohingya organisations have operated for years, indeed decades, in a legal system that does not recognise refugees as a domestic legal category. In the eyes of the state, Zafar is an undocumented migrant. He is not a lawful resident. So the only route to legality runs through a permission that, as far as the record shows, has never been granted to any Rohingya organisation!

Now the state is criminalising Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani for operating in precisely the legal limbo it created. He’s literally being criminalised for not having paperwork the state makes impossible to get.

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Malaysia talks endlessly about “humanity.” And humanitarian treatment.

On 14 August, Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said Malaysia did not want to be seen as a country that was “tidak berperikemanusiaan” - inhumane - by sending refugees back if their lives or safety were at risk. He also said UNHCR cooperation was important for checking refugee status and safety.

Then in the Home Ministry's 27 August statement, KDN said the DPP reflected the MADANI government's “pendekatan ihsan” (“compassionate/humane approach”) and repeatedly described refugee management and returns as “berperikemanusiaan” - humanitarian/humane.

And on 29 September, the Home Ministry was still saying the return operation was based on “nilai Ihsan dan semangat kekeluargaan ASEAN.” Yes, Google Translate it. It means “the values of compassion and the ASEAN spirit of family” and that it was being conducted “secara … berperikemanusiaan”, humanely.

And just to drive the point home, when Malaysian ministers talk about “nilai ihsan,” they are not using a random bit of moral language. Ihsan or compassion/benevolence is one of the government’s own defining MADANI values. That is why it is politically useful in this case. The government is explicitly presenting its refugee and repatriation policy as consistent with “ihsan.”

On 5 August, Fahmi Fadzil, Malaysia’s Communications Minister, said Malaysia would not send these refugees back if they faced persecution or threats to their lives. Such a humanitarian, eh? Today he announced the next 3,524 for return, even as UNHCR says it was denied access to the first group and could not establish whether their return was genuinely voluntary.

Let us have a quick look at what this voluntary repatriation is all about by looking at how the list was actually made. On 2 September, Fahmi Fadzil said the Home Ministry had screened about 5,000 names from more than 10,000 Myanmar nationals in immigration detention. These names were then sent to the Myanmar Embassy. Myanmar then agreed to take 1,476 of them. Now, with those people returned to Myanmar, Fahmi says the remaining 3,524 in phase two were “identified by the Myanmar authorities.” Yes, Myanmar chose them and sent their names formally to Malaysia in a diplomatic note. After which Malaysia says their consent was obtained. A signature from someone sitting in immigration detention, after Malaysia has put their name before the government they fled from, is not proof of free choice. Malaysia allowed the Myanmar junta to cherry-pick targets from detention cells, then called it safe return.

Here is what ihsan looks like from where I’m sitting. Two Rohingya I filmed in the very first documentary I ever made about the community are now hiding in their homes - scared witless. They have seen neighbours assaulted. They tell me they have watched police stop UNHCR card-holders and extract money from them before letting them go. Their husbands are frightened to go out because any encounter with the authorities could end in detention. Malaysia calls all this refugee management. To the two women, it feels like being hunted.

The political atmosphere has given every neighbourhood bully and amateur vigilante a license to have a go. Posters have circulated describing Rohingya as a “cancer” and urging Malaysians not to rent to them, employ them, transport them or trade with them.

This is where all the grand talk of ihsan lands.

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Aung Kyaw Moe, the former Deputy Minister for Human Rights in Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG), gave his first major interview to DVB English since resigning from the government. And it is baffling. In a 28-minute interview, he did not name the Arakan Army or point to a single NUG failure. Instead, he told Rohingya to “package” themselves as an asset to Myanmar.

In case you missed it, I wrote about it in DVB English.

I am wondering what his reasons are for such restraint. I suspect these will become clearer over time. But the political effect is clear. The NUG escapes serious scrutiny. At the same time, responsibility for the continuing weakness of Rohingya representation is pushed back onto the Rohingya. His politeness towards power is something to behold.

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What is happening at the UN this week? How about this meeting on Friday?

Take a look at the flyer above. It looks like Aung Kyaw Moe’s Rohingya Consultative Council has sewn up the institutional circuit. They are holding a UNGA sidelines event complete with diplomatic guests. More than that, they have assigned themselves titles grand enough for a small foreign ministry. Lucky Karim is now “Director of Diplomatic and Multilateral Affairs.”

Most revealingly, this supposedly “Rohingya-led dialogue” will be opened by Kyaw Moe Tun, a diplomat whose conspicuous lack of public intervention on the Rohingya I recently documented. In case you missed it, check it out here:

Instead of challenging that silence, the RCC rewards him with a platform and, I suppose, implied endorsement. This is access politics in its purest form. Those who have done little for the Rohingya are rehabilitated on stage.

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The other day, I noticed a comment on a Substack post of mine by “The Myanmar Review.” It said that “It should be said more. The Myanmar Review wrote about this a few days ago.” The comment did not quite make sense. What “should be said more?” Anyway, I visited the publication page, and I was taken aback. I quickly scanned some articles and my disappointment was immediate.

Here is a quick take about the publication. Launched 5 September 2026, it had 23 posts and roughly 40,000 words by 19 September. Prolific? Yes. Yet, it has no named editor, no contributor names, no contact address, no location.

It had 45 subscribers. Now, after my post on X, it has about 60! Everything is bylined “The Myanmar Review.” One post, on the American Chamber of Commerce, is co-bylined with a second anonymous Substack, The Burma Road, launched the same month, also nameless, also posting at machine pace, and the two restack each other.

As I wrote in another post on X, the publication

“has demanded the removal of Kyaw Moe Tun from Myanmar’s UN seat, argued that it is time to engage the military, attacked sanctions and overseas resistance, and blamed international Rohingya advocacy for becoming too closely connected to opposition to the military. Its article on Kyaw Moe Tun implicitly treats the institutions controlled by the junta as the state institutions entitled to representation. The archive is remarkably consistent in this direction, despite the publication claiming that it “does not support one side against another.”

All these themes track the brief that Myanmar’s Ministry of Information is paying DCI Group $3 million a year to advance in Washington, with Roger Stone on the account since February 2026.

What is verifiable about Stone and Myanmar

Spoiler Alert: There is no evidence that Roger Stone is behind The Myanmar Review. But the question in the title of this piece is not silly. The publication’s editorial line matches exactly the brief Roger Stone is paid to advance for Myanmar’s regime.

Myanmar’s Ministry of Information signed a $3 million annual contract with the Washington firm DCI Group on 31 July of last year. Yep, that is the same day the military nominally handed power to a “civilian” interim administration. The scope of the contract?

“public affairs services… with respect to rebuilding relations between the Republic of the Union of Myanmar and the United States, with a focus on trade, natural resources, and humanitarian relief.”

Stone was added to that account as a consultant at $50,000 a month.

So how do we know all this? Well, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the 1938 law requiring agents of foreign governments to disclose their work, the firm must report who is paying it and where the money goes. DCI’s latest filing for the six months ending March 31, 2026, shows the paper trail of Washington operatives cashing in on Myanmar’s junta.

For our purposes, DCI’s six-month FARA supplemental statement for the period ending 31 March 2026 doesn’t shed any light on this new Substack. We learn that Roger Stone officially took over the Myanmar account on February 27, 2026, teaming up with DCI director Adam Shaw and vice president Kelly Love, who were already on the clock as of December 1, 2025.

The payoff from Myanmar’s Ministry of Information was fast and obscene - $1.5 million in just six months.

According to the filing, DCI funnelled routine monthly retainers of between $40,000 and $80,000 to Davenport Ventures, a firm run by DCI senior advisor Doug Davenport. Then, on March 31, DCI cut a separate $50,000 check to Drake Ventures LLC, a corporate shell controlled by Stone himself. So it is all in the family!

DCI's filing for the period ending 31 March 2026 discloses no informational materials at all for Myanmar. A Substack launched in September 2026 would fall in the period ending 30 September, whose supplemental statement is due around November–December 2026. If DCI or Stone is producing this, FARA requires it to be disclosed there.

People have written about the influence so far - but this Substack is new. James Shwe’s account (published March, 2026) of this same influence push named Forbes, The Hill, The Washington Times and Modern Diplomacy as the placement venues and DCI, Dickens & Madson and the McKeon Group as the firms responsible. It named no Substack and did not mention Stone. The Diplomat's anatomy (published June 2026) mentions the Myanmar Narrative Think Tank, CNI Myanmar and pay-to-publish networks. But again, no Substack. The month of September has brought us Substack.

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That was where things stood when I began writing this last night. Then, just this morning, The Myanmar Review published something more revealing still. I need to interrupt the rest of this piece because the publication is no longer merely echoing themes that suit the junta. It is now offering Naypyidaw a practical public-affairs strategy for wooing Washington and securing relief from sanctions. Here is the checklist it suggests for Myanmar.

1. Invite Israel’s Head of Mission to Naypyidaw for a Jewish holiday.

2. Restore Yangon’s Musmeah Yeshua synagogue, preferably with money from Jewish-American philanthropists or Israel’s MASHAV programme.

3. Then give US military recovery teams unrestricted access to search for the remains of the 632 Americans still missing from the Second World War.

And Myanmar is advised to move quickly. This “transactional approach to sanctions relief”, the authors warn, reflects the instincts of the present administration and may not survive the next president.The piece explains its logic. Syria’s leader, it notes approvingly, “offered to build a Trump Tower in Damascus, ease hostilities with Israel, and give the US access to Syria’s oil and gas… as a single package that worked.”

So the junta needs to engage in flattery, provide a suitable gesture to Israel, resource access and all to be done at speed. How can this be called analysis of Myanmar? It is a public affairs strategy, and the two constituencies it targets, Jewish-American donors and the bipartisan POW/MIA lobby, were chosen for their clout in Washington!

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…..

In conclusion, I cannot tell you that the Myanmar Reivew Substack is part of that work being paid for by Myanmar. What I can tell you is that a disclosure covering this month is due in the autumn. Until then, I have one question for The Myanmar Review, and it requires no investigation to answer. Who are the diverse contributors? Name one.

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Remembrance, of course, matters, but remembrance can also become strangely comfortable or predictable. And I mean not in a good way.

The Rohingya story has somehow got frozen in August 2017. As such, everyone has a tidy role. The Myanmar military is the villain. The Rohingya are the victims. Bangladesh is the generous neighbour. The international community is there to express concern and dole out cash.

Except the Rohingya did not stop having a political life when they crossed the Naf River in August of 2017. And some of the things that have happened since then never get to see the light of day.

Just five days before this year’s remembrance day, Bangladesh’s army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman was talking about the Rohingya at the National Defence College.

If you understand Bengali, then play this video. If not, I translate the relevant words below.

His words were:

“We have learned how the Rohingya issue is affecting us, from damaging the environment in that area to putting huge pressure on the economy. From drug trafficking and smuggling, many kinds of unlawful activities are taking place there.”

The exact wording is worth noticing. Waker-Uz-Zaman did not say every Rohingya is a criminal. But if you look at the overall package - Rohingya, environmental damage, economic pressure, drugs, smuggling, crime. One thing slides neatly into the next.

And then look at how some media translated the message for the public:

A refugee population becomes an environmental, economic , narcotics, and general crime problem.

Two days later, the same sorts of arguments were trotted out by retired Brigadier General Hasan Md Shamsuddin. He published an article describing Bangladesh as having carried the “burden” of 1.3 million Rohingya and linking the crisis to pressure on the economy, environment, border security, social stability and governance.

The article acknowledges the Rohingya crisis, but its analytical centre of gravity is Bangladesh’s strategic interests, not Rohingya rights or political future.

According to the former general, Bangladesh should talk to the junta and to the AA. Bangladesh should coordinate with China, India, Malaysia and the United States. But nowhere does the author suggest that Rohingya themselves should be participants in negotiations about their return and the future of Rakhine. The people who would actually be sent back are totally absent from the proposed diplomatic schema he has worked out!

On 18 August, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shama Obaed Islam contrasted the present situation with the supposed success of Rohingya repatriation under President Ziaur Rahman.

She said a tripartite agreement had been forged then, with the United Nations as “a very active party”, and that this was why the process proved effective.

There is a problem right there. That is not what UNHCR’s own contemporary record says.

Its report on 1978 states plainly that the repatriation agreement of 9 July was concluded between the governments of Bangladesh and Burma. It was not some neat tripartite success story.

And there is a much darker part of that history. A later UNHCR review records that the deliberate cutting of food in the 1978 Rohingya camps led to widespread loss of life. It cites ration-cutting as precisely the sort of coercive measure that destroys the voluntary character of repatriation. Read the horrendous history in this article here: The Doctor on the motorbike.

The 1990s were hardly a glorious model either. Bangladesh and Myanmar initially agreed another bilateral repatriation scheme without UNHCR involvement. Human Rights Watch later documented forced returns.

So this is not some pointless historical quibble. When coercive repatriation gets retold decades later as successful diplomacy by a BNP minister, history is being cleaned up. And once you clean up the past, it becomes much easier to sell the same basic policy again.

To the great and good, “Repatriation” has become a magic word. Again and again we are told that the solution is safe, voluntary and dignified repatriation. Lovely phrase. Who could possibly object?

The problem comes when repatriation stops being one possible solution and becomes the only politically acceptable future. At least, that is the rhetroic. Bangladesh wants repatriation while Myanmar wants repatriation on its own terms. Regional governments want Rohingya out. International agencies organise their work around the prospect of repatriation being just around the corner. As a result, meaningful intervention is not necessary because there is no need - given everyone is about to pack up and leave for Myanmar!

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What needs remembering and highlighting.

Firstly, look at the people behind the fences. Rohingya are contained wherever they are - Bangladesh or elsewhere. And we have to call the situation in Bangladesh what it is: deliberate containment. More than a million Rohingya are systematically denied the right to move, work, study, or secure legal status. Humanitarian aid ensures basic survival, but politically, they remain warehoused.

Secondly, you cannot repatriate someone to an erased village. Hundreds of villages were burned in 2017. Afterwards, bulldozers flattened those sites. Roads, military installations and other structures were built on land where Rohingya homes had stood. Genocide isn’t just mass slaughter and forced expulsion. It is the deliberate re-engineering of the land to ensure return is physically impossible.

Just yesterday, OHCHR came out with a report. It makes for grim reading. Let me give you one bit of information the report contains. The Arakan Army is not simply blocking returns, but actively reshaping the demography and geography of northern Rakhine. OHCHR documents non-Rohingya settlements built directly on Rohingya land - including roughly 2,000 seized acres, eight new villages in Buthidaung, and the occupation of 11 emptied villages in Maungdaw. Rohingya have been coerced into dismantling their own homes. Village names are systematically wiped out. As the report warns, this engineering is calculated to destroy "any possibility of sustainable return.”

The focus on repatriation denies these realities. It is used as a coercive policy. Everyone has to accept as fact that this is the only solution. Never mind the complete absence of citizenship, safety or restitution. This is how Rohingya dispossession is being normalised.

Thirdly, the destruction of citizenship in Myanmar is oversimplified. And this has wide implications. The 1982 law was pivotal, but Rohingya were not suddenly converted into foreigners in one stroke once the law was passed. It was a helluva longer administrative process involving censuses, document confiscation, changing identity cards and progressively excluding Rohingya from recognised ethnic and political membership.

The violence of 2017 was not the beginning of the process; it was one culminating moment from decades in which the state had already been administratively separating the Rohingya from Myanmar society.

And here is the present-day implication of the above. Promising to scrap the 1982 Citizenship Law is not a solution - it is the bare minimum. You cannot undo decades of state crime by deleting a single statute. The entire apartheid edifice has to go.

In my book, that would require full recognition of Rohingya identity and citizenship free of discriminatory vetting/verification, political rights and restitution for confiscated property.

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( I think it is well understood by all and sundry that the “verification process” to establish belonging is simply a game played over and over for the press to lap up. It is perverse to demand that people violently driven from their homeland must somehow prove all over again that they actually belong there.)

Fourth - there is the grotesque hypocrisy across the region. India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand have settled on a standard playbook. Demonise Rohingya, deter them on land and sea. Lock them up. Deport them, including pushing people back out to sea or back to Myanmar. Whatever the consequences. In Malaysia and India especially, venomous anti-Rohingya hate campaigns are actively stoked on social media. Yet every August 25th, ASEAN’s moral bankruptcy and the violent criminalisation of Rohingya survival are quietly swept aside.

Then there is Rohingya political agency. Rohingya appear almost entirely as victims acted upon by Myanmar, the Arakan Army, INGOs and foreign powers. There is little to read about Rohingya civil society, resistance, armed groups, co-opted/captured groups, demands for citizenship and accountability, or disagreements within the community (apart from here at Rohingya Refugee News - so please subscribe!)

The danger is that humanitarian language reinforces this passivity. WFP’s favourite phrase is that “Rohingya are 100 percent dependent on aid.” No, they are not. There are some outcomes of this kind of vocabulary. If Rohingya are constantly portrayed as vulnerable beneficiaries, then outsiders remain the decision-makers. Bangladesh decides where they live. UN agencies decide how assistance works. Myanmar decides who may return from data provided by Bangladesh (taken with or without consent). International actors decide what counts as a realistic solution.

Then there is the political failure of the post-coup resistance. The NUG has only offered vague citizenship commitments. It has treated Rohingya equality as an afterthought. And it has failed to make Rohingya equality foundational to the anti-junta struggle. Across the broader resistance movement, the strategy has been to postpone Rohingya rights until some imagined democratic future. In the last two years, and particularly with the rise of the Arakan Army, the vacillation shown by these so-called anti-junta forces has been disheartening for the Rohingya.

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Finally, there is International law’s political selectivity.

Many Rohingya harbour no illusions. Even those Rohingya in the diaspora embedded in the NGO/INGO system will privately admit that international law has proved toothless. The legal filings at the ICC, ICJ and elsewhere make for impressive headlines, but that’s about it.

No one with a brain is fooled by states hiding behind these cases while washing their hands of real political action. Rohingya in the camps hear the endless rhetoric about accountability, but they look around only to see their daily confinement.

Right alongside "accountability" is the call to "end impunity.” This a phrase repeated so often in UN halls and elsewhere that it has lost all practical meaning. It just functions as a cheap moral posture.

The last thing to remember about Rohingya Genocide Remembrance is that donors and host authorities should not be allowed to claim the moral high ground through solemn August 25 statements - while maintaining a regime of containment. Commemorating genocide rings completely hollow when your policies deny the living a future.

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Finally, before you go. I am thinking about producing a book of photos taken by Rohingya photographers, along with some commentary from me. These Rohingya youths have produced stunning work. Much of it remains unseen.

I cannot see myself approaching publishers. Too time-consuming and I suspect very difficult. Therefore, the only way to do this quickly would be something self-published and funded directly through pre-orders. The design layout is pretty much done, thanks to my mate Catalin Dantis.

I have been thinking about this for too many years. So it is now or never. Would you back a project like this? Please vote in this poll below. It is anonymous and you are not committing to anything! It is just to give me an idea of whether it might work or not.

AKM chose not to answer me. He said he would soon make a public statement and that I could take my answers from that. Then, lo and behold, he gave an exclusive interview to DVB. The interview follows my three questions remarkably closely. What did he achieve? Why can he serve the Rohingya better outside the NUG? Was his appointment symbolic? My questions look very much like the blueprint for his interview.

I have not asked DVB’s team about the mechanics of their interview. Perhaps AKM passed the themes to DVB, requested the interview or whatever... But the content and sequence are too close to dismiss as coincidence. Even then, the answers are pretty thin. Holding office is offered as an achievement. Departure becomes a “strategic transition.” And tokenism is waved away by saying he was qualified and had equal authority. That is a defence of sorts, but it ducks the hard bit, no? That is, what did the Rohingya actually gain?

Readers now have both sides - the judgement of others in my op-ed and AKM’s half-hearted answers in his interview. And then came the final twist. On 21 August, the NUG announced that his former Ministry of Human Rights had been dissolved ( see the images below), supposedly to make way for an independent Union Human Rights Commission. AKM walked away, defended his record at a safe distance, and then the ministry itself vanished. Quite the coda.

Aung Kyaw Moe Walks Away

In just over a month, the Myanmar diaspora will be out with their banners outside the U.N. General Assembly in New York. September 19 has been designated a “Day of Action.” There are simultaneous rallies planned across European, Australian and Asian capitals. They will all be pushing the same message - let Kyaw Moe Tun keep his seat as Myanmar’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. And whatever happens - don’t let the Credentials Committee hand it to a regime stooge.

Kyaw Moe Tun is effectively the NUG-aligned representative of Myanmar at the UN. If you recall his history, his formal UN status does not derive from an accreditation of the NUG as Myanmar’s recognised government. He survives institutionally through his pre-coup accreditation as Myanmar’s Permanent Representative and the UN’s refusal to replace him with the junta’s nominee. See this page for an interesting UN exchange.

And Ambassador Tun’s role at the UN is not an insignificant one. DVB quotes Moe Zaw Oo, an advisor to the NUG’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as calling the ambassador’s continued presence “vital” to exposing the military’s atrocities. Yet should this be sufficient reason to excuse him from scrutiny on the Rohingya?

Before the coup, this man was not a Rohingya advocate. Indeed, he was sent to Geneva to make the Rohingya genocide allegations disappear. In fact, while serving as Myanmar’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2018 to 2020, he told the Human Rights Council in July 2019 that international criticism of Myanmar over Rakhine State amounted to “naming, shaming and pressuring the country based on groundless allegations.”

Then came the coup. There was his three-finger salute at the General Assembly. Min Aung Hlaing fired him but he refused to leave his post. All this was real, and it cost him something, I am sure. But watch below what happened just ten weeks later, when the test moved from “will you denounce the coup” to “will you commit to Rohingya citizenship.”

^{“That would be like a post-Nazi government saying we're going to carry out existing German law." Watch Congressman Brad Sherman press Myanmar's UN ambassador, Kyaw Moe Tun, on Rohingya citizenship in 2021 - and watch him squirm.}

On May 4, 2021, at a U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the unfolding crisis in Burma, Congressman Brad Sherman asked him directly - will the National Unity Government “provide citizenship documents to all Rohingya born in Burma or in the refugee camps?” Kyaw Moe Tun’s answer was that the NUG would act “in line with… the existing law,” while conceding the 1982 Citizenship Law “need[s] to be amended”.

Sherman was visibly irritated and didn’t let it slide. “For you to say ‘we’re going to carry out existing law’ would be like a post-Nazi government saying we’re going to carry out existing German law” Afterwards, on the platform then called Twitter, Sherman put it plainly: “He (Kyaw Moe Tun) speaks eloquently against the coup, but like many democracy advocates from Burma gives disappointing answers regarding #Rohingyas.”

His colleague on the subcommittee, Ted Lieu, went further: “The new National Unity Government does not include any Rohingya. We cannot support it until that is changed”. Those were two sitting members of the U.S. Congress, live in the room, and they were unconvinced by Kyaw Moe Tun’s answers.

A month after the hearing, on June 3, 2021, the NUG finally published its official "Policy Position on the Rohingya in Rakhine State." The document proposed what no previous Myanmar government had dared to - repealing the 1982 Citizenship Law, scrapping verification cards, and using the word "Rohingya" without hesitation.

Give the NUG credit when it is due. It was a real document. But it was also issued only after Sherman and Lieu made the NUG’s evasiveness a public embarrassment.

What to call that? Accountability by public pressure, not conviction, me thinks.

How Often Does Kyaw Moe Tun Actually Say “Rohingya”?

The NUG controls Myanmar’s UN seat and the message it broadcasts to the world. So it is pertinent to ask the only question that matters - after a full year on the global stage, how much of that platform was actually spent standing up for the Rohingya?

The ambassador’s office informed news outlet DVB English that he gave roughly 60 UN speeches between October 2024 and September 2025. So it was fairly easy for me to go through the Myanmar Permanent Mission’s published archive of statements etc., for that exact time period. I went through every text he delivered.

The mission’s “Statements” category alone comes to 61 entries. This is almost certainly the source of the “around 60” figure quoted by DVB. If one includes other interventions and Security Council stakeouts, the total comes to a whopping 80 separate interventions across a full calendar year of UN business. So at one level he is doing his job.

Nevertheless, the result of my survey revealed an interesting pattern. Our esteemed ambassador invokes the junta’s atrocities and casualty tolls in almost every single speech he gives, regardless of subject - disarmament, the UN budget, women’s rights, prison reform, peacekeeping doctrine. You name it.

The Rohingya get no such treatment.

Let’s take a look at my findings. I found that in his 80 interventions, the word “Rohingya” appears in only 18. Of these, just five statements are actually about the Rohingya crisis itself. Yes, you read that correctly. The other thirteen times? Pure copy-paste recycled single sentences shoved into speeches about totally unrelated topics just to check a box.

So in four out of five UN appearances over a full year, Myanmar’s ambassador did not mention the Rohingya at all.

This is far from a neutral statistic, but it is not surprising. Back in 2021, the ambassador ducked straight questions about Rohingya citizenship. In 2025, the NUG was running cover for its civilian leaders as they tried to ring-fence them from genocide charges in Argentine courts. (They even cajoled the Rohingya organisation that brought the action to support them). And when the Arakan Army attacked Rohingya villages, the NUG caved. They stealth-edited their own press release within hours. They scrubbed away any mention of who was actually to blame.

Against that track record, I would argue that ignoring the Rohingya in three-quarters of the Myanmar ambassador’s UN speeches cannot be called an oversight. It is a calculated choice about who this “movement,” for lack of a better word, is actually willing to stand up for.

Would one expect more interventions concerning the Rohingya? The answer is obvious. The Rohingya crisis is arguably the single most internationally consequential element of Myanmar’s file at the UN right now. Let’s cut through the noise because the legal backdrop is impossible to ignore.

There is the genocide case at the ICJ. Separetely, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing over the 2016–17 deportations. (In case you are wondering, that stands despite Karim Khan’s departure). Argentine courts secured an Interpol warrant. On top of all that, the UN General Assembly passes an annual resolution on the crisis, and even convened a full High-Level Conference specifically on it in September 2025.

Given these facts, surely it was incumbent upon the ambassador to put the Rohingya front and centre? He is the only recognised voice for the country - the junta’s representative isn't even credentialed. Every word he fails to speak is a word "Myanmar" leaves completely unsaid in that chamber.

Why Journalists Shouldn’t Let This Go

On July 28, 2026, I sent an email to Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun. I informed him that I was a journalist and that I have covered the Rohingya issue for a decade. I put two questions to him concerning citizenship for Rohingya (yes, that old nut) and accountability (specifically the NUG’s record on Aung San Suu Kyi, Htin Kyaw, and the Arakan Army).

I asked for a response by 5pm EST on August 1, 2026. Today is 13 August. He did not reply - not a partial answer and not even an acknowledgement. He dodged two direct, fact-based questions - questions about the very people whose suffering gives his exiled government its international legitimacy in the first place.

Why would he not be ready to speak plainly on these issues without qualifiers and diplomatic double-talk and set the record straight?

It is quite straightforward, I would have thought. The ambassador cannot vacillate about full citizenship for Rohingya. There can’t be any legal loopholes or qualifying remarks about “in line with existing law.” He should further state that there ought to be accountability for Aung San Suu Kyi and Htin Kyaw. It should also be within his remit to call out the Arakan Army by name for systematically burning Rohingya villages in Rakhine State in recent months.

If these basic truths are not possible for the Ambassador to discuss plainly in 2026, five full years after Congressman Sherman exposed his evasive answers, then I guess the idea that he represents some sort of revolutionary movement would be absurd. Ambassador Tun shouldn't be given a free pass just because the alternative is a murderous, unrecognised junta.

No, this is not going to be an article about Alan Clements or his mate Fergus Harlow - DVB’s in-house Suu Kyi propagandists. Today, I want to focus on this morning’s news item about Aung San Suu Kyi.

As a news piece, the write-up under the heading “ICRC meets with Aung San Suu Kyi in Naypyidaw” is appropriate only if the outlet has already decided to preserve Aung San Suu Kyi’s heroic image. As straight news, it is almost hero-worship.

The problem is not reporting her imprisonment, isolation or health concerns. These are obviously all relevant. It is the cumulative framing.

So we have the description. “Burma’s jailed State Counsellor.” What does this do? It treats her former office almost as a continuing title. Then we have “Nobel Peace Prize laureate.” Of course, it is undeniable that she received this prize. Still, in the news piece, it supplies heroic moral prestige without explaining how completely that reputation collapsed over the Rohingya genocide.

Then we come to the really insidious bits.

The junta, the article says, replaced her “civilian-led NLD administration.” Really? Does that not sanitise a government that defended the military at The Hague, denied rape, denied atrocities and excluded the Rohingya politically? In the same sentence, the “replaced … with a regime” phrasing creates an overly neat democracy-versus-dictatorship contrast. This is a false binary. And we all know it. The coup was unlawful and brutal, but the preceding government - ASSK’s government - was neither fully civilian nor rights-respecting. Ask any self-respecting NLD-er, and they will keep banging on about how the military controlled everything. And it is all very convenient - claim total military control when excusing the genocide, yet claim full "civilian democratic legitimacy" when condemning the coup.

Finally, the second paragraph turns the ICRC visit into another instalment of the imprisoned-democratic-icon narrative.

Even a short news item need not rehash these loaded phrases. But once it invokes the Nobel Prize and her supposed civilian democratic legitimacy, omitting the reason she became a reviled and trashed leader is an editorial choice. It ain’t neutrality!

This isn’t just about DVB, of course. Across international reporting, standard background boilerplate repetition of phrases like those mentioned above does a lot of ideological work. By failing to contextualise those titles and phrases with her active complicity in the Rohingya genocide, most visibly her defence of the military at the International Court of Justice, such news items default to an uncritical "heroic icon" archetype.

NEW!

Long Read in Counterpoint BD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read: The Doctor on the Motorbike

Counterpoint BD

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

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

Read DVB OpEd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s analyse what this means.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNHCR had a vehicle problem before Bangladesh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OIOS had already seen the same problems for years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Humanitarian Diplomacy?

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

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

So, who is the humanitarian system actually serving?

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

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

Internal Oversight Services audit of UNHCR operations in Bangladesh

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

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

The Medical Scandal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buying Favour and Indulging the Bureaucracy

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

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

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

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

Incompetence

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

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

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

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

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

The Bhasan Char Solar & Energy Fiasco

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

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

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

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

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

Humanitarian Gloss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

How Bangladesh is Exploiting the Rohingya Refugee Crisis

Rohingya repatriation as a governance tool in Bangladesh

The Myth of Rohingya Aid Dependency

The Architecture of Rohingya Exclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sentence strips away all pretence.

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

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

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

Now we are seeing the next stage.

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

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

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

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

Class Contempt

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

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

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

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

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

Safer for whom? Not for the person being labelled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attack the Messenger

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

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

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

It is a mob rehearsing its lines.

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

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

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

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