How Bangladesh is exploiting the Rohingya refugee crisis

The village of Tula Toli was the site of one of the worst massacres of the Rohingya people that took place in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017. On 30 August that year, the Myanmar military marched into the village. Survivor accounts detail how soldiers shot the men dead, threw babies onto burning pyres, raped women and locked them inside houses that they then set ablaze. The survivors who staggered away from that nightmare lost everything – their families, their homes, their land – and made their way across the nearby international border into Bangladesh. But that was just the beginning of their suffering.

The Tula Toli massacre was over in hours. In the years since, the survivors have faced an unrelenting sequence of crises that have stripped away their dignity, security and any illusion of safety. In Bangladesh’s refugee camps, they have been trapped behind barbed wire, banned from working and forced to beg for aid that is fast disappearing. Fires have gutted their shelters. Gangs have kidnapped their sons. Traffickers have lured away their daughters. Their food rations have been slashed to such levels that they face starvation. They have no legal rights and nowhere to go. They have been left to endure an existence of permanent insecurity.