Unkind Cut

How a media fixation on sexual violence and exploitation harmed the Rohingya

- VIDYA KRISHNAN

THE USUAL BASE FOR INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISTS covering the Rohingya crisis is a hotel by the beach in Cox’s Bazar, a Bangladeshi resort town some sixty kilometres north of the vast refugee camps at Kutupalong and Balukhali. Every morning, they pile into SUVs, vans or pickup trucks, and join the stream of traffic taking aid workers, human-rights experts, and other out-of-towners southwards. The typical media team bound for the camps includes a driver, a reporter, a photographer, sometimes a cameraman or two, and, almost always, a local journalist as an assistant. The local journalists—“fixers” in the lingo of the international media—are typically possessed of multiple talents. Conversant in English, Bangla, and, preferably, the Rohingya language as well, they serve as translators and guides, manage logistics and dispense security advice. They must be savvy and well-networked enough to arrange any required permissions, to identify relevant sources, to persuade refugees to trust complete strangers with the details of their present and past. Beyond that, they must be bridges across cultural divides—able to decipher and explain clashing manners and contexts, to know just which words to use, and which never to utter, when translating questions and answers. These are the unsung heroes of international journalism, essential to the work of foreign correspondents, but too often not credited and badly paid.

I first visited Cox’s Bazar and started speaking with local journalists while reporting for