From Charles Santiago
The first thing that struck me in Cox’s Bazar was the air – thick with dust, tinged with the faint smell of smoke from cooking fires that never quite hid the hunger.
Children ran barefoot through narrow alleys of bamboo and tarpaulin, their laughter brittle, their eyes already older than their years.
I stopped more than once, unsure whether I was intruding on resilience or bearing witness to despair.
In every face, I saw a question that lingers still: “How long must we wait for the world to see us?”
Myanmar’s cruelty continues to metastasise. A new conscription law now demands that Rohingya men and boys fight for the very army that razed their villages.
It is a grotesque bargain: serve or die, though the truth is that both paths lead to the grave. And yet, alongside this law, Bangladesh and Myanmar have signed a memorandum of understanding on “voluntary repatriation”.
The words twist like barbed wire: voluntary, when the choice is between hunger…