There's a little bit of tension at the beginning because what you have is that that's the front line between British forces and Japanese forces. But overall they are far more a part of the state in those early years. They're still able to go to university, travel around. It's around that time that they lose that. And then in 1978 this is the first big military operation and they call it a kind of a population exercise.
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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