by Sid Holt
Awake in Chein Khar Li, Futhu could think only of his family. One of his friends told him to stay put, that there could be danger on the road. As the hours dragged on, the bullet rain kept falling. By dawn, Futhu decided to risk it. In the morning light, he could see the security services and gunfire on the main road. To the north, the beach was calm, waves lapping at the shore. He ran. When he arrived home, the house was empty. His thoughts, normally so ordered and rapid, now broke apart and scattered: How will I find my family? What will I do now? How will I save myself? He hurried to the Big Village to check his in-laws’ house, with the thought that his family could have fled there. At his mother-in-law’s place, he found a woman he did not know taking refuge. She had not seen his wife or his parents.
The bullet rain was now joined by the thunder of heavy weapons and explosions. Futhu picked his way from one house to the next, asking for his family. At the main mosque, he spotted a crowd of men making their own calculations: Those with small children were running to the hills, while older people were staying put. They told Futhu to check his aunt’s house. They thought they’d seen his family there.
When Futhu finally saw them—his father, mother, wife, and children all together, all safe—there was the briefest moment of relief. They had fled that morning, not knowing how to pass him the message that they were seeking shelter. Futhu filled his father in on what he’d seen along the way.
“What should we do?” his father asked.
“We don’t have a choice,” Futhu decided. “We follow the crowd.”
The path to the mountains crossed the road on which the military trucks traveled. Though they were parked outside Chein Khar Li, they could move at any moment. Futhu and his family agreed to run fast. They could only hope the trucks did not shudder to life.
When the family set out, they tried to stay together, but the young couple were weighed down by two babies. Futhu’s wife carried their youngest, and Futhu carried their toddler. Soon they lost each other in the scrum of people scrambling up the hills, jagged with rocks and slippery with monsoon mud. Futhu’s sandals got stuck immediately, so he threw them off. All he had was a red T-shirt, trousers, and a raincoat. The tiny cluster collided with other families picking their way up the mountains, everyone using any limbs they could to cling to the land while moving toward the sky. When they got above the village, they cast their eyes below. In Chein Khar Li, smoke and red flames danced in unison. Bodies were strewn on the ground. Dunse Para appeared empty. A few young men braved the route down to Chein Khar Li to scavenge food and returned with burned rice and tales of burned bodies. Darkness came. Futhu and his family decided they would sleep there. There were about two dozen people sheltering under a tiny scrap of tarp.
The next morning, an ethereal, unnatural calm settled like mist. In Dunse Para, Foyaz Ullah held out hope. Maybe the military wouldn’t come. First one day passed, then two. Soon the people in the hills would return. Their village would again be spared. Futhu and his family walked to another village, Boshora, where they slept two nights. They ate and prayed it was all over. They collected a few pots, dried meat, and a larger tarp, in case they would have to run again.
On August 28, in the early morning, the security services entered Dunse Para and Boshora, weapons firing. Instantly, the residents knew they had never been safe. Futhu and his family ran again. They heard explosions at their backs. They clambered up the mountains again, higher and higher, and sheltered under the trees. When the military entered Dunse Para, those who had remained tried to run up the same paths. Foyaz Ullah’s family dashed out of their house. As they ran, a bullet tore through Foyaz Ullah’s torso. He was murdered by the same people he’d tried to appease, in front of those he’d tried to calm. There was such chaos, such surprise, that mothers let go of their children. They left elderly grandparents who could not run behind. Those bodies would burn in the houses they’d built with their own hands. One mother’s body was found charred, tied, dragged to a boat, and mutilated.
From the heights of the hills, just as the security officer had prophesied, Futhu watched his world turn to ashes. He could see half a dozen villages below. All were bathed in bright red flames topped with plumes of black smoke. He thought about the school he had built and almost rebuilt. The books and newspapers he had read and collected. And the diaries. The knowledge and stories and proofs he’d painstakingly chronicled, which he believed would outlast him no matter what happened to his body, vanished to soot.
* * *
Across Rakhine State, in the early hours of August 25, ARSA had launched thirty simultaneous attacks on checkposts, but the government response did not distinguish between civilians and militants. It was as if the authorities had been waiting for an excuse. Troop buildup had been underway for months. At least twenty-seven army battalions, joined by the BGP and civilian Rakhine militias, began to cleanse the land.
The military had seeded Facebook with anti-Rohingya propaganda, taking cues from the ultrafanatic monks who had propagated anti-Muslim sentiment. Massacres spread like waves. At least 10,000 men, women, and children were slaughtered—stabbed, beheaded, quartered, set on fire, shot. Babies were pried from their mothers’ arms and tossed in fires. Some were cut into pieces. Women were abducted, locked in houses, bitten, and gang raped, their breasts cut off, before they, too, were set aflame. (U Tin Thin Soe, the Rakhine village administrator for the Koe Tan Kauk village tract, denied that ten men had been arrested; he said the Rohingya were terrorists who burned down their own houses and fled.)
For days, the hills were a jumble of confusion and rumors. Families set off in one direction, thinking it was safe, only to reverse course and walk back upon seeing destruction or a new checkpost. Bodies, alive and dead, were everywhere. If you could not see them, you could hear them talking through the trees. By night, young people gathered and planned to make trips down to their villages, to scavenge for food, to look for and bury their dead. Futhu wanted to join them and look for his diaries, but his father forbade it. “If we die, we die here without eating. You don’t need to go down there to die again.”
On the fifth night, there was a new rumor—the military would come into the mountains soon, so everyone was fleeing into Bangladesh. Futhu and his family followed, walking all night through the mud and crossing a small river the following day. When they came upon the white sandy beach of the large Naf River, they saw a never-ending collection of people. The most crowded marketplace Futhu had seen did not compare. People were pitching tarpaulin tents, spreading their meager belongings on the sand.
Boatmen came and went, ferrying families. Futhu did not want to go to the nearest Bangladeshi shore. The government might set rules about who could enter, and they might end up stranded on the water. He wanted to go to Cox’s Bazar’s main port, deeper into Bangladesh. When the boatman wanted an exorbitant fare, he didn’t bother negotiating. The night of their trip, it rained more than Futhu had ever remembered it raining. Fourteen hours later, on September 7, thirteen days after they fled their village, the boat stopped in chest-high water, and Futhu helped his mother and wife off to the shore.
Futhu’s family was among the 700,000 Rohingya who arrived to Bangladesh in one of the largest, most precipitous exoduses of refugees in recent history. They slept along a main highway, stringing up tarps as a tent. On their third morning on the road, the Bangladeshi military commanded them to all move away into the dense jungle. They trudged through the trees, forming the biggest and most congested refugee settlement on Earth. As if overnight, the jungle was cleared. Bamboo and tarp shacks upon shacks sprang up along the muddy hills, which shifted under their weight. Monsoons caused landslides; new arrivals were unable to find even a small patch of earth to tolerate them. Endangered Asian elephants now found their paths brimming with endangered human bodies. They trampled tents, killing thirteen refugees and injuring dozens.
One night, that first hectic week, Futhu sat down and started a new diary. He tried to write down what happened to hi
m as carefully as he could—the dates of fleeing the village, the nights spent in the hills—but he found that his usually orderly brain had broken. His thoughts seemed to disintegrate: Had it been this day or that one? The images of death, flames, and violence were strong, but the facts and dates were hazy. It was as if his brain had not recorded the memories in order. He drafted the timeline for a week, starting and stopping, and then beginning again.
Because everyone from Dunse Para fled at roughly the same time, they lived in roughly the same patch of camp—an entire village transported. Every time he met a familiar face on a muddy path, he inquired about the person’s family. He asked how many relatives were injured or if anyone had died. If the person’s family survived, he asked what they had heard about their neighbors. Futhu decided he needed another document. Where once he had mapped the lives of his villagers, he now chronicled their deaths. He wrote in English and titled it “List of Died.” With each name, a face swam through his mind. In the end, there were twelve names on his list. Futhu reminded himself that he was lucky: He was alive. He had not written any of his own family members’ names. Still, he knew all of these souls—mothers, children, and sons. It was important to keep track of history.
* * *
I met Futhu one afternoon almost a year to the day after the August carnage, next to the largest metal bridge in the camps, which had been donated by the Japanese government, its inscription now reading, “From th e ple of Japan.” The news from the summer of 2017 had been pornographic in its misery, shocking the world. A United Nations fact-finding mission has since levied charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Myanmar’s military commanders. But for anyone who had been following the plight of the Rohingya, what happened in August was inevitable. How had the Rohingya lived every day in a country that did not want them, through generations that have been marked by exodus as steadily as the seasons? I met an old man who had been a refugee four times. How did he return each time? How could he start again and think it would end any differently? How do you live every day on borrowed time?
With the help of a translator, I interviewed more than two dozen people to understand what had happened in Dunse Para, and Futhu, still in his early thirties, was referred to me as one of the most knowledgeable members of the community. He asked that his name not be used and offered a childhood nickname to protect him from retribution in the case of repatriation. Futhu’s story tumbled out in a torrent. He often started years before the event I had asked him about. His explanations went on for hours. Futhu worked during the day, and foreigners could not stay in the camps after dusk, so we met at his work, at his shack and in the huts of his family members, snatching hours when we could, spending the days he had off together. Other people I spoke to called their own community “miserable,” “pitiful,” and “wretched”—but Futhu did not speak this way. He lived in Myanmar as he meant to, as anyone would, believing things could change if you just tried hard enough, not because it was some grand idea he had, though he did have it, but because ultimately he had no other choice.
Life in the camps was at once better and worse than life in Myanmar. Unlike in their village, they could sleep through the night without worrying about being killed. But they were forbidden to leave the camps and needed permission to travel to proper hospitals outside its boundaries. Forces far outside their community controlled their fate. Myanmar and Bangladesh are negotiating for repatriation. Many Rohingya say they will refuse to go without official ethnic recognition, but they have no elected leaders or representatives at the table. ARSA, meanwhile, has made its presence known in the camps, and executions of those who speak out against them continue. The United Nations refugee agency is trying to arbitrate. But who knows how suddenly this place too would again cast the Rohingya off.
Bangladesh does not allow Rohingya to enroll in government schools. UNICEF had set up “child-friendly spaces”—but children went there to play and draw pictures, not to learn. Aid agencies also set up some “learning centers” without a set curriculum. Futhu scoffed at the uselessness. Private tutoring schools cropped up, like the kind Futhu attended as a refugee, but they covered only basic math and language instruction, not history or science or anything else children would need to pass exams. Classes were held for just an hour a day. Another generation living in a grave. They were still teaching to the Burmese education system, hopeful as ever that their situation would change and they would return to their land.
Day to day, Futhu survived, and you could even say he prospered. He volunteered for the World Food Program and received promotions to become the manager of an aid-distribution site. But he stopped teaching, and he stopped keeping his diaries. Sometimes he wrote down the dates and times of a few events on his cell phone—an International Committee of the Red Cross delegation visit or the birth of a baby—but his nightly chronicles had ceased. He told me that it was because the camps were crowded and humid, that there was no peace in which he could put together his thoughts, but I wondered if there wasn’t something else, if this life was not really the one he wanted to document.
* * *
In all the hours we spent talking, Futhu only ever asked me one question: What did I think would happen to the Rohingya? I told him I didn’t know. I asked what he thought about returning to Dunse Para. One day he told me he wanted nothing more than to return with his rights; another day he decided he would rather perish in the sea.
I’d read that the Burmese government was building a model village on Dunse Para’s lands, which now were nothing more than unkept fields with burned stumps. When I mentioned this to Futhu, he told me he had heard the same but did not want to believe it. It seemed too much—to cast them off their earth and then just take it? The events of October 9 and August 25 played regularly in his mind. When he dreamed, he saw only his father, who died several months earlier, buried in the camp graveyard, far from the land he sprang from. “Everyone will die one day,” he told me. “I will also have to die. I convinced my mind of that. But about the hardship we went through, I failed to convince myself to forget about them.”
On my last night in the camps, at around eight p.m., well past the dusk curfew, Futhu was kneeling in the bamboo hut as the darkness stretched its arms through the cracks in the thatch, his face silhouetted against a single solar-powered light bulb. Something happened in him then—I still don’t know what—but Futhu, who had always been so optimistic and purposeful, suddenly crumbled. The hut had filled with relatives and neighbors, and in front of his family and villagers, he started weighing his life.
“Is this a life anybody can look forward to? Why live such a life full of hardship?” he asked. “My kids, my father.… My father died, my grandfather died. Nothing has changed. Now it’s my turn. I have kids. This is the time, I have to try to support my kids. I don’t even want to have kids anymore. Thinking about it is useless. We are just trying to survive here, and also I don’t know what will happen to my future. My head gets messed up if I think about it. All the things I used to do. That time I was very much into this campaign for education, but right now I don’t want to think about it. My heart is in so much turmoil.”
He sat on his knees, his face in anguish. He looked at me, calling me “sister,” as he had begun to after our first week together.
“Sister, your parents supported you for better education, they suffered for your literacy, spent hard-earned money to make you an expert. Now you are using that expertise to help your relatives, your country, or maybe other countries too. If someone doesn’t get that type of opportunity to use this expertise, what’s the use of doing all this hard work and making your parents suffer through this the whole time?” he asked.
“My parents supported my education. It would have been better if they hadn’t. I would have been saved from all the trouble and the beating. It’s like that, sister. If you die, it’s the end. Or maybe if we died … many people died … it would have been the end. Instead, we came running with our lives. S
ometimes when I think about it, it feels so painful. I feel like letting go of everything.”
I spent one month in the camps in Bangladesh listening to stories of rape and destruction, but nothing prepared me for the genocide of the mind. A people can survive a mass murder; those who remain can rebuild their lives. But what happens when a people’s identity is taken from them? When for years they are repeatedly erased from their earth? When for generations they are told that they do not exist? And what about when the brightest among them give up, stop writing, stop teaching, and stop thinking? Is this not what the Burmese government was seeking all along? How useless was all the work Futhu put into educating people, when the goal of one man was subject to forces so far beyond his control?
Before I left that night, I gave Futhu a present, a notebook I thought he could use as a diary if he ever found the inspiration. Our parting was heavy and clumsy. Futhu told me he was sure that if they went back, they would all be killed.
We kept in touch over WhatsApp when Futhu could get signal—the network in the camps was terrible at best. After I left, he messaged me and told me he had started keeping his diary again. He told me he dreamed of saving enough money to buy a computer. A few weeks later, he messaged to say that he was involved in a new project, planting trees in the camp to help stop landslides—to cement roots into the earth. A few weeks after that, he messaged again, saying that he was working with other community leaders to open a new school. It would teach Burmese, English, and math. It aimed to reach 1,000 students.
In December, they finished building the school—a large bamboo shelter with blue tarp. By January, it needed repair. Futhu explained that they did not have money for proper construction. They were collecting money from students’ parents, but those refugees did not have jobs, and there was no real income to pay for education. The landslide project had moved forward, and he often sent me photos of trees and plants. He messaged me about the dreams he had of his father. Sometimes they were running from the Burmese military; sometimes they were just talking about his life. He most often messaged me lamenting his diaries, the destruction of his carefully collected histories. He asked frequently about this article. He wanted to know how people in America felt about the Rohingya. He wanted to know if he could hold a copy of this magazine. He begged me not to forget to send it to him. He said he wanted to keep it for the future.