If you’ve heard of my people, the Rohingya, it is probably as faraway, faceless victims of violence, displacement and possible genocide — a people defined by suffering.
Yes, we are in crisis. We are a predominantly Muslim minority from western Myanmar who have been persecuted for decades. In 2017, the country’s military began a campaign that drove hundreds of thousands of us across the border into Bangladesh, where a generation of Rohingya is growing up in refugee camps with no end in sight.
Global indifference prolongs our plight. Humanitarian crises from Gaza to Ukraine to Sudan are debated, condemned and covered extensively by the media. Yet if the Rohingya are noticed at all, it is as part of a distant “forgotten” crisis — not as the people living within it.
But we are not just victims. We are a people with our own long, distinctive history, defined by faith, resilience and a determination to shape our future — a people worth fighting for.
At last, there is a sliver of hope.
This month, the International Court of Justice opened hearings in The Hague on whether Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya — something the country denies — opening a potential path toward accountability and recognition of what we’ve endured. The first full genocide case brought before the court in more than a decade, it could also set a wider precedent for how the world responds to large-scale violence and impunity.
But for the Rohingya, real change could take years — time we don’t have as cuts in aid by the United States and other countries bring new hardships.
The refusal to see the Rohingya begins in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar itself, where the military junta denies that we belong.
Generations of Rohingya have grown up under constant fear. When my mother wanted me to stop crying, she would say the words sure to quiet any Rohingya child: “The military is coming.”
In August 2017, when I was 14, we hid at home for days as gunfire rang out in our village. My parents decided that we should flee for our lives. I haven’t seen my home since.
Along with thousands of others, we walked for a week through rain and mud to Bangladesh, where we ended up in the vast refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar. More than a million Rohingya live there. I spent the next six years in a shelter made of bamboo and tarp.
Life in the camps was harsh: floods that swept away shelters, chilly winters and sweltering summers, mosquitoes and disease. We had no formal schooling or jobs. Yet we clung to who we are. Neighbours shared what little they had. Women drew flowers or wrote our names on our hands with henna during Eid. Children played games. My mother planted banana trees that embodied our will to survive and grow.
I taught myself English by watching YouTube videos of Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show. By 15, I was helping visiting delegations and journalists who needed a translator. A year later, I enrolled in college in the Bangladeshi city of Chattogram and traveled back to the camp to persuade Rohingya parents to send their girls to school. Many feared education was meaningless or that their daughters would be targeted.
Everything changed in 2022 when my family was selected for resettlement in the US. In December, we arrived in Chicago to start a new life.
More than a million refugees remain in the camps. Some of my friends have had children there. When I visited recently, children asked the same questions I once asked: Why are we still here? When can I go to school? When can we go home? I had no answers.
Time is running out. US cuts in foreign aid are cascading through the global effort to help the Rohingya, though the Trump administration has pledged to continue targeted support. The World Food Program has warned that funding shortages threaten food aid, raising the risk of hunger and malnutrition.
If the court rules that genocide occurred, it could strengthen global pressure on Myanmar and make it harder for countries to engage with the junta. But a ruling could take months or longer. In the meantime, without sustained international support, Rohingya exile and dispossession will continue.
We may be stateless and marginalised, but we know who we are. The world needs to see us, too.
The New York Times