Murals provide balm in dismal refugee camps

KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh — With his blond dreads tied in a ponytail and baggy jeans caked with paint smudges, Max Frieder first arrived at the cramped Rohingya refugee camps in December. Unlike many other foreigners, he wasn’t an aid worker in one of the biggest camps for Myanmar’s persecuted minority in southern Bangladesh.

His mission: bringing color and art to one of the most dismal places in the world.

Amid the sea of makeshift bamboo-and-tarp shelters dotting the rolling hills of Kutupalong, some huts are now painted over with colorful murals. Each mural is a collection of stories from the lives of Rohingya refugees and their hopes for the future.

Frieder and his partner Joel Bergner run a public art organization called Artolution. They’ve made hundreds of large-scale murals around the world, particularly with communities living in conflict zones, from Syrian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon to the Gaza Strip and Israel.

“You might have food, you might have water, you might have shelter, but there are many deep-rooted psychological traumas that refugees around the world are facing today,” Frieder said.

In Bangladesh, they spent several weeks interacting with children and other refugees interested in drawing and painting. They created more than a dozen murals spread across the expansive camps — covering schools, toilets and gathering spaces with a myriad colors.

While hundreds of children, teenagers and entire families came together to participate in painting the murals, some refugees said they found their calling in art.

Rohingya face official and social discrimination in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, which denies most of them citizenship and basic rights because they are looked on as immigrants from Bangladesh, even though many of them settled in Myanmar generations ago. Dire conditions led more than 200,000 to flee the country between 2012 and 2015.

The latest crisis began last August after the Myanmar military crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in retaliation for an insurgent attack. The military responded with counterinsurgency sweeps and was accused of widespread human rights violations, including rape, murder, torture and the burning of Rohingya homes. Thousands are believed to have died and about 700,000 fled to Bangladesh. The U.N. and U.S. officials have called the government’s military campaign ethnic cleansing.

Rishabh R. Jain is an Associated Press writer.

Manish Swarup / Associated Press Rohingya Muslim refugee children from Myanmar play outside a makeshift school in their refugee camp. The walls are covered with murals created by public art organization Artolution.