Bangladesh prof shares Rohingya refugees’ stories

Chittagong university teacher shines a light on crisis hitting more than a million Burmese

Through the window, Maqsood saw soldiers coming towards his house. He quickly gathered his two daughters, his toddler son and his wife who was 6 months pregnant. Holding their hands, he rushed them towards the back door of their house in Rakhine, Burma. But the soldiers were already there.

They grabbed his two daughters and took them into the surrounding forest. Maqsood couldn’t help them, he just ran with his wife and son, away from the screams of his two young girls. They ran for two days and one night.

When they reached the bank of the river between Burma and Bangladesh, his wife stopped. She couldn’t breathe. In a split second, a landmine exploded near her, destroying into fragments her body, and with her, their unborn child.

Somehow, Maqsood crossed the border with his almost two-year-old son into Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, now home to over one million Rohingya refugees.

Dr. Nasir Uddin is telling Maqsood’s story this week in a lecture circuit that takes him to the Asian Institute at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and Wilfrid Laurier University.

For the last three months, Uddin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh, has recorded the stories of over 500 Rohingya refugees that have fled to the city he was born and raised in. He asked them where they lived, what situations they left their home in, how they crossed the border and why they fled.

Each time the answer was the same: We were going to be killed.

Every story Uddin heard, every memory that was recalled for him, was filled with instances of unimaginable trauma. The 500 narratives became difficult to carry for the man who has worked with Rohingya refugees for two decades. In the process he became sick — a persistent headache, fever, vomiting. He spent two days in the hospital. Uddin is calling on the international community, including Canada to move beyond discussions of humanitarian aid and assistance. “The international community should come and stand beside Rohingya people,” he said. “We have to demand they can go back to their home with social safety, human dignity and legal recognition.”