In Short:
Cox’s Bazar, once seen as a refuge, now holds over a million Rohingya Muslims in harsh, restrictive conditions. Deprived of education, work, and safety, their suffering is met with global indifference. Sanam Sutirath Wazir asks: What does it truly mean to live without dignity?
At first glance, Cox’s Bazar is stunning — hills rolling into the sea, skies stretching endlessly above the world’s longest beach. But tucked behind this deceptive beauty lies one of the most pressing human rights and climate emergencies of our time: the forgotten crisis of the Rohingya Muslims.
Walk through the camps, and you will find uniformity — not of peace, but of pain. Every shelter, every face, every gaze carries the same shadow of fear. Each family fled with stories identical in horror: homes torched, loved ones lost, and freedom ripped from their lives in Myanmar. But what the world seems to forget is that the persecution did not end at the border.
Cox’s Bazar was supposed to be a refuge. Instead, it became another open-air prison
‘Rohingya Women Don’t Have Words To Describe the Abuse’
More than a million Rohingyas live here in tightly packed shelters made of bamboo and tarpaulin, perched precariously on deforested, slippery hillsides. These shelters collapse during the monsoon, and landslides are a cruel constant. With every rainfall, the ground turns to mush — homes are lost, lives disrupted, and yet, the world rarely turns to look.
This is not just a refugee crisis. It is a human rights emergency unfolding in the shadow of indifference.
The Big Points
Life in Limbo
Over a million Rohingyas live in overcrowded, unsafe shelters in Cox’s Bazar, facing constant landslides, violence, and restrictions that prevent them from having a future
Systemic Denial
Rohingyas have no access to formal education, employment, or freedom of movement, leaving them stateless and trapped in cycles of deprivation
Gendered Suffering
Rohingya women endure unspoken gender-based violence, lacking even words or support to describe and fight the abuse due to denied education and agency
Unseen Crisis
The world debates repatriation and resettlement but rarely addresses empowerment or dignity for Rohingyas, perpetuating a cycle of neglect and silence
Their movement is heavily restricted. There is no formal education system to dream through, no real jobs to hold onto, no future to imagine. Rohingyas — especially women — live with violence that is both intimate and systemic. Gender-based violence festers in silence, often unspoken and unnamed.
Many women do not even have the words to describe the abuse they’ve endured — because when you are denied education, denied agency, denied even the idea of choice, how do you fight for dignity?
And the children? They grow up on the same muddy paths. In the same hunger. In the same fear. They learn to shrink before they learn to speak. Here, politics overrides compassion. Hope is rationed like rice.
Why have we not asked the real question?
What does it mean to be alive but not allowed to live?
‘Rohingyas Are Not Invisible, We Refuse to See Them’
The Rohingyas are labeled as stateless, faceless, voiceless. But they are not invisible. We just refuse to see them. The world debates repatriation, resettlement, relocation — but no one talks about empowerment. About the right to learn. About the right to work, to dream, to love without fear. About the right to simply exist with dignity.
Rohingyas are seen as a burden because they are mostly unskilled — but how can a people build skills when they are caged? When the only tools handed to them are survival and silence?
The international community has a moral obligation. Not just to feed, but to free. Not just to shelter, but to uplift. The Rohingyas do not need sympathy. They need opportunity. The kind that lets a child open a book without fear. That lets a child say, “I want to be a teacher,” and not be laughed at by circumstance.
Cox’s Bazar is not a resting place. It is a limbo. And the longer we let the Rohingya people remain in this waiting room of humanity, the more we betray their resilience — and our own.
Let us not be remembered as the generation that looked away.
Let us be the ones who finally said: enough silence, enough statelessness, enough sorrow. Dignity is not a privilege. It is a right.
