Kitchener man wants to be his people’s ‘voice’

Muhammad Saifullah spent part of his childhood in a refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Today, he’s studying in Kitchener to be a journalist, so that he can help tell the world about what’s happening to his people.

Saifullah is Rohingya, a member of the Muslim minority in Myanmar.

He remembers when his family had to leave their farm and move to Bangladesh thanks to government persecution. He was just five years old.

That was in the early 1990s. Today that persecution has reached new levels of genocidal violence.

Rohingya villages have been burned, the inhabitants shot or driven away to starve in the forest.

Since August, more than 700,000 have fled to Bangladesh, where they live in refugee camps or in makeshift tents. Many are starving.

Bangladesh is a poor country and has said it can’t supply the refugees with their needs.

So a plan has been made to return some of the Rohingya to Myanmar, the country that drove them out. What a horrifying prospect.

Saifullah was lucky. He managed to leave the refugee camp when he was 10, to attend school in Bangladesh. He had to hide his identity and sneaked back into the camp at night to visit his parents, brothers and sister.

Later, he got a scholarship to attend university in Thailand.

After two years, he moved to Malaysia and taught Rohingya children in a United Nations school.

All this time, he was aware of the worsening situation for his people.

“We didn’t have any voice for our community,” he said. He helped to start a news channel on YouTube called “Rohingya Vision TV” so that people could know what was happening.

The young journalists got help writing and editing from reporters at Al-Jazeera, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, he said.

The broadcast is now available in some countries on satellite TV and broadcasts to many of the 3.5 million Rohingya globally in several languages including Arabic, Burmese and English, he said.

In 2016, Saifullah came to Canada as a refugee. He was sponsored by a relative living in Kitchener. The Rohingya population here, though tiny, is still the largest in the country.

Saifullah has tried to raise awareness. Last year he and others started the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Saifullah, whose family still languishes in that refugee camp 25 years later, has met with Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland to ask that this country let in more Rohingya refugees.

He also met several times with Bob Rae, the former Ontario premier who was this country’s special envoy to Myanmar.

Rae recently released a report that called the situation “tragic.”

He urges a multi-year $150-million plan for Canada’s response, including humanitarian assistance, increasing the number of refugees welcomed here, and working with likeminded countries to put pressure on Myanmar.

Saifullah, now 30, is enrolled in the journalism program at Conestoga College in Kitchener.

Once he’s fully trained, he wants to work in the media, to help the Rohingya people who are still suffering.

“It is my responsibility to do something for my people,” he said.

“They need our voice.”