Dil Mohammed's Election Campaign in the Rohingya Camps
Smuggler Turned Statesman?
My new op-ed in The Dhaka Tribune just went live. It tracks the latest reinvention of Dil Mohammed - from cartel fixer and forced-recruitment broker to would-be “elected” Rohingya leader. You can read it here:
Dhaka Tribune | How one man is shaping Rohingya repatriation rhetoric
But there’s a piece of evidence I couldn’t embed in the newspaper version: a 90-second segment of his speech (recorded 17 June) in which Dil Mohammed mentions a camp-wide vote to crown a single Rohingya figurehead. Below is the clip plus an English translation.
“Joyful Day” Video | Camp 26 | 17 June
Translation:
One more thing - in the future, a joyful day is coming, a day that no Rohingya, nor any generation before us, has ever witnessed in our entire history. That is — hearing that, with votes from the Rohingya, a leader will be elected. With Rohingya's votes, whom will you elect? Which leader will be better to elect? Who or which brother can truly think for the betterment of the Rohingya? And under whose leadership can we move closer to our rightful goal? You all brothers, considering all these aspects, cast your votes for the right person. (Applause). After numerous calls for the election of Rohingya leaders, this progress is finally becoming a reality, largely due to RCPR’s commitment. Who? RCPR. Have you ever heard of such a thing, even in a dream? Did you? Now I myself am telling you. It is becoming real.
What to note about this video:
1. Hand-picked electorate, pre-cleared candidates – Refugee camp sources say only 3 000–7 000 residents per camp will be invited to vote 2. A single spokesman – Dil Mohammed’s subtext is that the elected figure is meant to stand above every faction and speak for the entire camp. In other words, one voice for the UN, OIC, donors, Myanmar (?!) - and a convenient buffer for Dhaka. 3. Rebranding on steroids – Six months ago this same man vowed to “give my blood” for jihad. Now he’s pitching electoral legitimacy!
A few days later he travelled to Camp 12 and delivered this passage:
Our homeland is yearning for us, but it seems we no longer yearn for it. These days, we’ve become comfortable doing business here, building and running madrasas and schools. When we invite ten people to a meeting, only five show up - because we’ve become too busy, too occupied.
Oh fathers, the sun has already begun to set and who knows how long it will take before it rises again. For us, the sun is setting now. This is the time to act while the last light remains. Do not wait for total darkness.
Our country cries out for us - she is calling, she is aching for her children to return. And yet here we are, living under tarpaulin sheets - shelters not even fit for the cattle we once raised back in Arakan.
Taken together with his Teknaf speech, he is using nostalgia as mobilisation. Every reference to “parents’ graves” or “our rivers” ( I will publish the whole translation shortly) becomes an emotional trigger that stitches personal memory to a nationalist duty to return. Again, unlike his December rally, he now frames repatriation not as a holy war but as a moral community project - far less inflammatory and far more palatable to outsiders. Crucially, Dhaka aims to project this repatriation-first narrative for various domestic and international reasons. By echoing this script, Dil Mohammed makes himself instrumental.
A footnote on footnotes: International Crisis Group’s selective memory.
The International Crisis Group’s (ICG) latest report devotes quite a bit of space to Dil Mohammed, reframing him as a central actor in the Rohingya crisis. That spotlight is welcome. Yet the report omits the very first mainstream profile of the man, my February and March 2025 investigations in the Dhaka Tribune. For the past six months, I have been the only journalist writing about Dil Mohammed. I have included him in other analytical pieces in Dhaka Tribune and DVB English. But there is no mention of these. It’s a familiar pattern: think-tanks harvest local reporting, then present it as fresh intelligence.
True, ICG do cite this newsletter, Rohingya Refugee News, in a couple of footnotes. Call me old-fashioned, but I do think good research builds on the shoulders of earlier journalism; good scholarship acknowledges it in more than buried footnotes or, worse, silence. The DT piece documented Dil Mohammed’s junta ties, his forced-recruitment quotas, the weapons deal he brokered with the Myanmar military that the report now cites (RSO privately challenged the story; when I shared my source, they offered no rebuttal), and the December unity rally months before anyone else.
Proper attribution is not vanity; it is the basic currency that keeps frontline reporting alive and protects those of us who gather uncomfortable facts at personal risk. Readers deserve to trace the chain of evidence plainly, and reporters deserve to see their work properly cited. I guess ICG’s excuse would be “house style”? That is the euphemism, no? It is not the first time I have experienced this, and I am sure it will not be the last.
I’ll stay on this story as the “joyful day” approaches. Meanwhile, any analyst drafting footnotes can save time with this one-stop link to my full Dil Mohammed archive. You’re welcome.