“100 Per Cent Dependent”: Orlando Bloom in the Rohingya Camps
How the aid industry scripts compassion.
Earlier this week UNICEF released a statement on Orlando Bloom’s visit to the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. The Hollywood star, now a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, delivered exactly the message the aid establishment and the Bangladeshi government depend on:
“There’s really nowhere to farm or for these families to support themselves. So they’re 100 per cent dependent on aid from UNICEF and their partners.”
It’s a perfect soundbite and the perfect myth.
The Rohingya are not 100 percent dependent on anyone. They are made dependent by design. Bangladesh bans them from working or moving freely, and aid agencies rarely challenge that system. Yet inside and outside those barbed wire fences, Rohingya people work, farm for others, drive tomtoms, repair, carry bricks, fish, and sell vegetables in makeshift markets. They do so illegally, often at risk of arrest, assault, or worse.
When a celebrity repeats the language of “full dependency,” it is not only a harmless simplification, but it also reinforces the containment narrative that keeps a million people trapped and exploitable. Humanitarian communication thrives on such phrases because they turn complex politics into consumable pity.
What is Bloom’s visit about? It is about how effortlessly the aid industry converts survival into a kind of spectacle. Beyond the staged compassion and official language are lives sustained by their own resilience, not by the machinery that claims to save them.
The humanitarian system often casts itself in heroic terms - saving lives, protecting children, fighting hunger, etc. Bloom is famous for playing Legolas, the elf who never misses his mark in The Lord of the Rings. But the target of his flawless delivery in Cox’s Bazar is wrong. The Rohingya don’t need rescuing from nature or fate; they need liberation from policy.
If you are on X, I am posting a series of ten worker stories. Working to Survive - short testimonies from Rohingya workers whose daily labour exposes the fiction of “full dependency.” I will also be posting a longer take on this “entirely dependent on aid” myth.