In an age of 800 word hot takes and churn, it so struck me how what you've presented in this book are these kind of extremely long-form, deeply immersive stories. Did you set out the very beginning to do that kind of journalism, Camille? It seems at times and travel with them to kind of bring that story back in that way. I think what happened is in 2015 there was the, what they call the boat crisis, the discovery of mass graves in Thailand which kind of forced a light onto the boat traffic that have happened for years between Bangladesh and Myanmar. What happened again, and I think it's starting, we're seeing signs of it now.
The Rohingya people of Myanmar have been persecuted for decades. The worst period of violence flared up in August 2017, when almost 700,000 Rohingya were forced to leave Myanmar after a large-scale military operation. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was in power at the time. Today very few members of this Muslim minority remain in the country. Instead they live mostly in Bangladesh’s refugee camps, or, precariously, in Malaysia, India, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. What does it mean for an entire people to be living in exile? Journalist Kaamil Ahmed has spent years trying to answer that question, which forms the themes of his new book, I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers, while trying to reveal the extraordinary resilience that has helped these scattered communities survive. Our host for this discussion is Carl Miller, author and Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos.
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