refugee camps
Residents watch a fire spread through the Balukhali Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. March 2021 photograph by Mainul Islam.
Mainul Islam, a freelance photographer specializing in street photography, lives in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. This interview was conducted by Sojourners' Jenna Barnett in December and January via WhatsApp.
I STARTED TAKING photos because I want to tell the stories of our Rohingya people’s struggle.
I was born in 1994 in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. I have been living in the camp for about 28 years. [It] is known to the government of Bangladesh as the Registrar Refugee Camp. The Bangladesh government has police, Ansar members, and an executive magistrate to control the camp. There are various NGOs, but we are not getting any good service from them. I don’t think of it as a camp. This is a detention center. Educational institutions have been closed for four years. We are not getting the basic rights that a human being needs to survive. The rejection of citizenship rights for Rohingya, denial of freedom of movement, eviction campaigns, violence against women, forced labor, expulsion from their lands and property, violence and torture have made Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya the most persecuted minority in the world.
There is a barbed wire fence around the Rohingya camp. That’s why we are always trying to create joy inside the camp with sports, festivals, and weddings. We are playing football, volleyball, cricket, chinlone, etc. There are mosques and madrasas in the Rohingya refugee camps, and they go there to practice their faith.
A Christian IDP camp. Image via Festus Iyorah.
In northern Nigeria, the epicenter of insurgency and ethno-religious violence, Christians are the minority and have experienced widespread persecution from terrorists who share the extremist view of creating an Islamic state across northern Nigeria.
When I first visited Ethiopia at the height of the 1984 famine, I watched as twenty-four people died of starvation in less than fifteen minutes, right in front of my eyes. Barely five years into my career as a Congressman, nothing my staff told me beforehand could have prepared me for what I saw on that trip.
Gasping at awful photographs of unspeakable human suffering is one thing; bearing firsthand witness to human suffering is another thing entirely. Glancing at a picture of a starving child in the newspaper, you can always turn away, but when you're staring into the eyes of a mother who has just lost that child, it's a completely different story. There's no looking the other way.
That's why I often describe those first Ethiopia experiences as my "converting ground" on issues of global hunger. What happened in Ethiopia changed me, and changed how an entire generation looks at hunger.
It's also why I'm currently back on the Horn of Africa, reporting on the ground from the Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya, less than fifty miles from the Somali border. And I am appealing to my affluent brothers and sisters in the United Stated and around the world not to look away. We need your help.