Cato Aall: A Norwegian Whistleblower in the Rohingya Camps
The forgotten doctor who challenged both the Bangladesh government and the UN as thousands of Rohingya children died.
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.