The Science of Survival: Two New Rohingya Stories from RRN
Over the next few weeks, I will be publishing two pieces that look at very different moments in the Rohingya story. One is historical, and one is contemporary. Yet both point to a similar problem - how institutions respond when Rohingya lives fall through the gaps of policy, bureaucracy, and politics.
The Doctor on the Motorbike: The Legacy of Cato Aall
Long before the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar became a permanent fixture of global headlines, there were individuals inside the humanitarian system who saw what was happening and refused to look away.
One of them was Cato Aall, a Norwegian physician and nutrition scientist who travelled between the refugee camps during the 1978 Rohingya crisis on a small motorbike, measuring rations, mortality rates, and the unfolding nutritional collapse.
What he documented was startling. Refugees were receiving barely enough calories to survive. While many officials preferred reassuring language about aid provision, Aall warned bluntly that the camps were drifting toward what he called an “artificial famine-like condition.”
In a humanitarian system often constrained by political sensitivities, Aall did something rare - he insisted that science, the simple arithmetic of calories and survival, could not be ignored.
The article draws on archival material, contemporaneous reports from the 1978 refugee crisis, and interviews conducted more recently with people familiar with Aall’s work. It revisits Aall’s warnings and asks what they reveal about the long history of Rohingya aid policies and how debates about rations, assistance, and control continue to echo today.
The article also argues that Cato Aall deserves to be remembered as one of the earliest voices to document, with clarity and courage, the human cost of Rohingya displacement.
When Disappearances Disappear: The Case of Dil Mohammed
Bangladesh’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances was hailed as a landmark step toward accountability for the abuses of the previous era. However, for the Rohingya community, the promise of justice remains a hollow echo.
For many families, the commission represented a rare chance that long-ignored cases might finally receive official scrutiny.
But one disappearance stands out for its absence.
Dil Mohammed, a Rohingya community leader, was detained in circumstances that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention later characterised as an enforced disappearance involving Bangladeshi security agencies. The UN ruling was formally communicated to the authorities.
Yet when the commission published its final report, Dil Mohammed’s case did not appear.
The forthcoming piece examines how a case already recognised at the international level appears to have slipped through the gaps of a national inquiry. Through interviews with legal experts, commissioners, and the family, it asks a simple but troubling question:
How does a disappearance disappear from the record?
Taken together, these two stories sadly speak to a recurring problem in the history of the Rohingya crisis. That is how evidence is produced, ignored, rediscovered, or sometimes quietly omitted!
In 1978, Cato Aall insisted that the basic science of human survival could not be wished away. Fifty years later, questions remain about how certain Rohingya cases are recorded, or not recorded, within official investigations. Both pieces look at what happens when uncomfortable facts meet institutional reluctance.
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