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Shown at the Documentary Arts Asia Gallery in February 2012 – also part of the 2012 Chiang Mai Documentary Arts Festival
“We came to Bangladesh and became refugees,” 43-year-old Rahul said to me in December 2009. “Here we live under plastic sheets. In daytime it gets very hot. And in nighttime it is very cold, sometimes at night dew drops form on the plastic sheets of our roof. We eat once but starve twice. We are able to work very little and it’s not enough to buy food. Despite this suffering, when we remember the abuse in Myanmar, we think it is better here than in Myanmar.”
“It is better here than in Burma”, is an incredibly shocking statement to hear considering the squalor Rohingya refugees are living with in Bangladesh. But it is a common statement, which has always left me wondering how much worse could life be for Rohingya in Burma to make them tolerate their existence in southern Bangladesh?
I began photographing the Rohingya in Bangladesh in early 2006 and believe the Rohingya’s story is one of the most critical and one of the most underreported stories of human rights abuse in Asia. Since 2006, I have returned seven times in an effort to chronicle their plight, and with each trip, their situation gets worse and worse. My last trip was in October 2010.
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority from western Myanmar (Burma). In Burma, they are denied most social, civil and economic rights and are subjected to a number of human rights abuses. In 1982, the Rohingya in Burma were made stateless when discriminatory citizenship laws effectively stripped them of their nationality. Abuse in Burma over the past 60 years has caused one wave of Rohingya after another to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.
Yet, in Bangladesh most are denied official refugee status and have found little sanctuary. Exploited, harassed by local authorities and permitted to receive little humanitarian assistance, the Rohingya in Bangladesh eek out an existence.
To protect themselves, the Rohingya have created makeshift refugee camps. In 2008, Rohingya in Bangladesh began to create a new makeshift camp called the Kutupalong Makeshift camp. Since it’s inception, the camp has grown from a few families to over 20,000 people. Camp conditions are some of the worst in the world.
In late 2009/early 2010, Bangladeshi authorities commenced a cracked down on undocumented Rohingya, arresting and forcibly repatriating hundreds back to Burma or putting them in jail. The crackdown displaced thousands and sent out a wave of fear that left many too afraid to leave their homes to find work.
Unwanted in Burma and unwelcome in Bangladesh, the Rohingya live in a cycle of misery that has no borders. My work on the Rohingya aims not only to document and expose the ongoing struggles and neglect the Rohingya face in Bangladesh, but also to open a small window into the root cause of their plight – the targeted abuse their community endures in Burma. I believe that without knowing the stories behind why the Rohingya continue to flee their homeland, people will not truly understand or fully appreciate the tragedy of their story.
Greg Constantine
Greg Constantine is an award winning photojournalist from the United States. In late 2005 he moved to Asia and began work on his on-going project, Nowhere People. Over the past five years he has documented the plight of stateless people in Asia, Africa, Europe and most recently, the Dominican Republic, in an effort to reveal the impact statelessness has on the human condition.
His work has been recognized in Pictures of the Year International, NPPA Best of Photojournalism and the Human Rights Press Awards in Hong Kong. In 2008, he received the Feature Photography award from the Society Of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) and the Harry Chapin Media Award for Photojournalism. In June 2009, the Asia Society awarded Greg and four journalists from the International Herald Tribune the prestigious Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism in Asia for their work on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in Burma. In 2011, his work on the Rohingya was recognized again in the Human Rights Press Awards and in the Days Japan Photojournalism Awards.
He is a recipient of a visiting research fellowship from Oxford Brookes University in the UK (2008), was named a finalist for the 2009 Getty For Good Grant and in 2009 and was a recipient of an OSI Distribution Grant for his work on the stateless Nubian community in Kenya.
Exhibitions of his work have been held in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, London, Geneva and at the UN Headquarters in NYC, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and Royal Albert Hall and HOST Gallery in London. In 2011, he was selected by the Open Society for Moving Walls 19. Greg is currently based in Southeast Asia.
Greg first book, Kenya’s Nubians: Then Now was published in November 2011 and will be the first of a series of books that highlight the plight of stateless communities around the world. The book Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya will be published in May 2012.
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