Rohingya future uncertain 8 years after Myanmar exodus

As the international community is urged to find a sustainable solution to the refugee crisis, Bangladesh says it has no scope to allocate further resources. Alisha Rahaman Sarkar reports

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Muhammad Rezwan was 21 when he walked hundreds of miles to flee attacks on his home by the Myanmar army in 2017, a military campaign that UN experts have characterised as a genocide. Eight years later, he is kept awake at night not by immediate threats to his safety, but by the thought of raising his two daughters – aged two and four - in the world's largest refugee camp in Bangladesh. “It is almost a decade since I fled with hundreds of people in my village for a better future. But the situation is still grim. The future of my young daughters is at stake,” Rezwan tells The Independent.

Bangladesh is sheltering around 1.2 million Rohingya Muslim refugees – half of them children - who have fled waves of violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Of these, some 700,000 came in a huge exodus beginning on 25 August 2017, travelling by foot and by boat amid indiscriminate shelling, massacres, and the torching of entire villages in Rakhine state, where Myanmar’s army was fighting the Arakan Army insurgent group.

The military crackdown in Rakhine came at a time when Aung San Suu Kyi was in power as state counsellor. She infamously defended the military against allegations of genocide in 2019 at the International Court of Justice, before she was deposed by those same generals in a 2021 coup d’etat. The Independent’s documentary Cancelled: The Rise and Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi explores that episode as well as Suu Kyi’s continued imprisonment.