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In a dusty, hot refugee camp in Haryana, India, a six-year-old Rohingya child plays with a doll, digging in the mud. When asked what he is doing, he replies, “I’m building a kabristan (graveyard).”
Nearly 2,000 kms away, in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, Rohingya at a refugee camp are angry about the recent repatriation offer from the Myanmar government, which has offered to issue returning refugees National Verification Cards (NVC) that are usually issued to foreigners, instead of national identity cards.
“They want us to return to our home country that is not willing to accept us as citizens,” says one of the Rohingya refugees. “Can you imagine how humiliating it is to be someone that nobody wants?”
The Rohingya are mostly from the Rakhine State in Myanmar (also known as Burma). As Muslims in a predominantly Buddhist country, they have been at the receiving end of discrimination for decades. But violence against the Rohingya escalated especially in the last several years, driving hundreds of thousands of them out of their villages, and many even out of Myanmar.
More than 900,000 Rohingya have been stuck in refugee camps in Bangladesh for years now. Nearly 100,000 meanwhile have fled to Thailand, while an estimated 40,000 are in India. Other Asian countries such as Nepal and Indonesia also have Rohingya refugees.
At over 1.4 million and growing, the Rohingya have one of the biggest populations among the stateless people in the world. A 2017 study has estimated that one in seven stateless people at present belongs to this community, which the UNCHR has noted suffers from more than average everyday stress, frustration, and insecurity. But that doesn’t capture the entire picture.
“In the past 35 years, we have gone from a people with a sense of belonging and security in our homeland, to a people who are now called ‘the world’s most persecuted minority’,” says Muhammad Noor, co-founder of Rohingya Project, which uses technology to work on financial and social inclusion of the community. “My people have been driven out of Burma, they speak the language of their host country, and our culture, our very social fabric, is getting lost.”
A ‘social death’
In fact, researchers believe that the genocide of the sorts that the Rohingya have been subjected to for decades is not just physical; it has also systematically destroyed their culture and identity. The erasure of their songs, poetry, and their very language is akin to ‘social death,’ which researchers explain is what a community experiences when it loses the social structures and cultural context that bind it.
Some Rohingya refugees, however, are trying to race against time to preserve as much as they can of their culture, partly through their very own script.
“Some people in the camp say that the Rohingya script is useless, that their children will be better off learning English,” says Mohd Ismail, who teaches the script to children at a ramshackle refugee camp of rag pickers in Faridabad, in the Indian state of Haryana. “To them I say, how can we forget where we have come from?”
In truth, many Rohingya still do not know that the Hanifi Rohingya alphabet exists. Up until some 30 years ago, the Rohingya indeed had no script of their own, and resorted to writing their language using Arabic, Burmese, or Latin alphabets. Ismail recalls, “After we fled our homeland, I often worried how we would preserve our culture without being able to write it down. When you have no script, you have no history.”
These days, Ismail happily teaches the Rohingya script to the 35-odd children aged six to 13 who come to have lessons at the bamboo shed that he built with the help of his brother for about INR 25,000 (US$304). In the morning, they learn English, Hindi, and maths. Come afternoon, Ismail pulls out tattered books printed from PDFs online, and teaches them the Rohingya alphabet, numbers, and even poetry.
He says that his task is to get his students ready for mainstream schools through their morning classes,” while the Rohingya language class in the afternoons is to connect them to their roots. Ismail does not charge any fees for teaching, and even buys notebooks for his students.
None of his students is able to go to regular Indian schools as they do not have the required national ID cards. Tasmida Begum, whose two children are among Ismail’s students, says, “I’m happy they’re learning our language here – at least they’re learning something!” But she adds, “I also want them to learn English, as it will help them get ahead.”
In their own words – and script
For sure, though, having Rohingya children learn their language’s own alphabet is already huge leap for the community. It had taken until sometime in the 1980s before Bangladesh-based scholar Mohammad Hanif and his colleagues were able to create a phonetic script of the Rohingya language based on Arabic letters. Because that was before the age of the digitalization and the Internet, however, few knew about it, limiting its use.
Determined to change that, Noor and his colleagues spent almost six years digitizing the Hanifi Rohingya alphabet and designing its font. In 2018, the Rohingya Unicode was finally released and adopted by Google, Android, and Apple.
Within no time, the script was being learned all over the world — in classrooms and even on Whatsapp and Zoom. Ismail was among the early adopters. “It took me barely a month to learn it,” says the 32-year-old maulvi (teacher), who also runs a small store at the refugee camp in Faridabad. “After all, it’s my own language!”
About 64 kms away, in another refugee camp in Mewat, Haryana, Hafiz Abdullah Qureshi is learning the language with a Whatsapp group of Rohingya script learners across the world.
“I spend time practising it every day,” he says. “It makes me feel connected to my community. Like Ismail, Qureshi, who is also 32, says that the script feels “familiar, as if it’s always been here.”
That sense of familiarity and belonging is important for a people who have been brutally uprooted and feel unwelcome almost everywhere they go. Delhi-based cartoonist Sharad Sharma glimpsed the impact of displacement on refugee psyches when he trained some young Rohingya boys and girls in the capital’s refugee camps to tell their own stories in the graphic form.
The graphic narratives were published in a compendium Rendered Stateless not Voiceless by his non-profit, World Comics, which enables disempowered communities to express themselves through the non-threatening medium of comics. Wrote Tasmida, one of the contributors to the compendium: “Every time, everywhere, they always torture Rohingya people, but we are helpless and we can’t say anything against them or they will kill our entire family. We have to leave this country for our own future.” Another contributor, Mizan, wrote simply, “I do not want to be homeless again.”
From culture to crimes
The recurring themes in the work of the Rohingya refugees are stark: many write about the insecurity of their lives, being scared of the police, not being able to access health services and schools because they do not have the Indian national ID or Aadhar Card – and the singular lack of cultural pride.
According to humanitarian experts, asserting their cultural and communal pride is not easy for refugees, especially the Rohingya. “They are so hugely neglected by the international community, that I call them the ‘dalits’ (lowest castes in the Hindu caste system) of the refugee world,” says Avinash Kumar, fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies and former head of Amnesty International in India. “Most are mired in their daily struggle for food, health, education, security, and jobs and have little bandwidth to collectivize, let alone take pride in their cultural heritage.”
At the very least, Noor is trying to make sure they will still have something tangible to call their own and be proud of. He says, “The Burmese government wants to erase our identity and history. So we decided to archive not just rare documents, but all possible cultural artefacts from our lives in Burma.”
Four years ago, Noor and his associates at the Rohingya Project in Malaysia started the laborious process of digitizing rare pre-genocide documents belonging to the Rohingya – IDs, passports, photographs, among others, which refugees found hard to preserve in their camps, but were all wrapped in a wealth of stories, memories, and history.
“So much has already been destroyed in fires and floods there,” Noor says.
Noor and his colleagues, however, are also working on preserving the community’s most painful memories in the form of the Rohingya Genocide Archive, a compilation of authenticated visual media evidence of genocidal crimes perpetrated against the Rohingya. Noor’s group is archiving videos shared on social media showing villages being burned, dead bodies, and people leaving their homes, all of which run the risk of being taken down because of their graphic content. “This way,” says Noor, “we can ensure that they are not lost, removed or simply rendered unfindable.”
For Noor, who has never set foot in Myanmar (his family migrated to Saudi Arabia before he was born), documenting the Rohingya culture, language and history is perhaps also a search for his own identity. Qureshi and Ismail have been able to connect with refugees in India and abroad by learning and teaching the Rohingya script. But for the majority of the people that Kumar earlier referred to as the ‘dalits’ among refugees, the road toward cultural pride is going to be rocky and long.
For now, children in the Faridabad refugee camp dutifully recite the Rohingya alphabet that Maulvi Ismail is writing on the blackboard. Says Ismail: “At least we have our own script now. It’s more than what we’ve had before.”◉
This report was made possible by the LEDE Fellowship 2023 that was granted to the author by the Solutions Journalism Network.