Mongtaz Begum was locked in a threatening house but managed to survive with one of her daughters. She lost all of her children and her husband before she crawled out into Bangladesh. Many people, it was violence that was seen by other villages who saw what was happening and fled. I found so many cases of where men were called into meetings by the military authorities and they were executed. And so then their families, once they realized that had happened left. It was an extreme trauma because so many of them lost their family members.
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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