The Fishermen Who Lost the Sea: Myanmar's Rohingya and the Bay of Bengal

The boy is seven years old and he has never stood in a place that was his. Mohammad Rafiq was born in the Kutupalong camp three months after his mother walked across the Naf River carrying his sister and a bag of rice. He has lived in Section C, Block 4, Shelter 277 his entire life. The shelter is four metres by three metres. The walls are bamboo and tarpaulin. When this correspondent asks what he wants to be when he grows up, he says he wants to be a fisherman like his father was. His father is sitting beside him. His father has not been a fisherman for nine years.

There are 38,000 children like Mohammad in the camps that sprawl across Cox's Bazar district in southeastern Bangladesh. They were born after August 2017, when Myanmar's military launched what the United Nations later called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. They have never seen the Irrawaddy Delta. They have never walked through a village that their grandfather built. They speak Rohingya and they speak the Bengali they hear in the markets, but they cannot go to Bengali schools and Myanmar will not take them back.

This is what statelessness looks like when it lasts long enough to become hereditary.

What They Left Behind

Mohammad's father, Kamal Hussein, was a fisherman in Buthidaung Township in Rakhine State. He owned a boat. He owned nets. He owned a house with a tin roof and a small plot where his wife grew vegetables. In August 2017, after the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police posts, the military came to Buthidaung. What happened next has been documented by UN investigators, by Human Rights Watch, by the International Criminal Court. Villages were burned. Women were raped in systematic patterns that indicated central command. Men were shot in fields and in mosques.

Kamal does not use the word genocide. He says: they burned the house. They shot his neighbour. They said we had to leave. He walked with his wife and daughter for four days. They crossed the border at night, wading through the river with water up to their chests. His daughter was five years old. She rode on his shoulders. His wife was six months pregnant.

The camp at Kutupalong was built for 20,000 people. It now holds over 600,000. The shelters are packed so tightly that when fires start—and they start often, because people cook with open flames under tarpaulin—they spread through entire blocks in minutes. In March 2021, a fire destroyed 10,000 shelters in four hours. Eleven people died. Kamal's shelter survived. His neighbours rebuilt with the same materials: bamboo and tarpaulin.

The Children Who Know Only This

Mohammad attends a learning centre run by BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO. He learns basic numeracy and literacy in Rohingya. He learns some English. He does not learn the Myanmar curriculum, because Myanmar does not recognise Rohingya as a legitimate language of instruction. He does not learn the Bangladeshi curriculum, because Bangladesh considers the Rohingya temporary guests and will not allow them to integrate. The learning centres are careful to call themselves learning centres, not schools. Schools would imply permanence.

The teachers in the learning centres are themselves Rohingya refugees. They are paid small stipends by international organisations. One of them, Yasmin Ara, taught primary school in Maungdaw Township before 2017. She taught the Myanmar curriculum. Her students took the national exams. Some of them went to university in Yangon. She says this with a precision that suggests she has said it many times, to many reporters, and that it still surprises her.

Her students draw pictures of houses with tin roofs. They draw boats. They have never lived in a house with a tin roof. They have never been in a boat. They are drawing what their parents describe.

What the Governments Say

Myanmar's position is straightforward: the Rohingya are illegal Bengali immigrants who have no claim to citizenship. The 1982 Citizenship Law lists 135 recognised ethnic groups. Rohingya are not among them. The military junta, which seized power in February 2021, has shown no interest in revisiting this classification. It has more pressing concerns. It is fighting a civil war against ethnic militias and the remnants of the democratic opposition. Rakhine State, where most Rohingya lived, is now controlled by the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine militia that is no friendlier to Rohingya than the military was.

Bangladesh's position is more complicated. The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has housed 919,000 refugees for nine years. It has done so with limited international support and with increasing domestic political pressure. Bangladeshis in Cox's Bazar complain that the camps have driven up rents, driven down wages, and increased crime. This is a poor district in a poor country. The refugees are not popular.

In 2019, Bangladesh attempted to begin repatriations. No Rohingya volunteered to return. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said conditions in Myanmar were not conducive to safe return. The repatriations did not happen. In 2023, Bangladesh began relocating Rohingya to Bhasan Char, a remote silt island in the Bay of Bengal that floods during monsoon season. The government says the island is a temporary solution until repatriation becomes possible. The refugees call it a prison. Over 30,000 have been moved there, some voluntarily, many not.

What the Numbers Show

The international response to the Rohingya crisis has followed the usual trajectory of humanitarian emergencies: initial attention, declining interest, chronic underfunding. In 2018, the UN Joint Response Plan for Rohingya refugees was 61% funded. In 2024, it was 48% funded. The gap represents cuts to food rations, health services, and education programmes. In January 2024, the World Food Programme reduced food assistance from $12 per person per month to $10. In June, it reduced it again to $8.

The reduction in food assistance has predictable consequences. Malnutrition rates among children under five have increased. More families are taking on debt to buy food. More girls are being married young because their families cannot afford to feed them. The aid agencies document all of this carefully. They issue reports with charts and recommendations. Nothing changes.

The Boats That Keep Leaving

Some people do not wait for repatriation. In November 2025, a boat carrying 178 Rohingya refugees left Cox's Bazar heading for Malaysia. It was intercepted by the Bangladeshi coast guard and turned back. In December, another boat left. It made it to Indonesian waters before running out of fuel. Sixty-three people were rescued. Fourteen bodies were found. The rest are missing, which is the polite way of saying they drowned.

The boats are organised by smugglers who charge between $1,500 and $3,000 per person. The refugees sell everything they have. They borrow from relatives. They promise to repay once they find work in Malaysia, where several hundred thousand Rohingya already live, most of them without legal status. Malaysia does not recognise refugees. It detains them, exploits them, and occasionally deports them. They go anyway, because the camps are not a life, they are a waiting room, and after nine years it is clear that what they are waiting for is not coming.

What Nobody Is Saying

The international community speaks carefully about the Rohingya. The UN uses the phrase "conditions conducive to return." Diplomats speak of "dialogue with Myanmar" and "regional cooperation." Nobody says what is obvious: Myanmar is never going to take them back. Not this junta. Not any government that follows. The Rohingya were stripped of citizenship in 1982. They were ethnically cleansed in 2017. The country has spent four decades constructing a legal and ideological framework that defines them as non-Burmese. This will not be reversed.

Which means the question is not whether the Rohingya will return home. The question is what happens to 919,000 people—soon to be more, because birth rates in the camps are high—who cannot go home and cannot stay where they are. Bangladesh is not going to grant them citizenship. It is a densely populated country with 170 million people and limited resources. The region's other countries have made their positions clear: they will not resettle Rohingya. Malaysia detains them. Thailand pushes their boats back to sea. Indonesia accepts them reluctantly and temporarily.

The only mechanism designed to handle stateless refugee populations at this scale is international resettlement. But resettlement requires countries willing to accept refugees. Between 2017 and 2024, just 4,890 Rohingya refugees were resettled to third countries. At that pace, it would take 188 years to resettle the current population.

What Comes Next

Mohammad is seven years old. His sister is twelve. His mother is pregnant again. They live in four metres by three metres of bamboo and tarpaulin in a camp that was supposed to be temporary and is now entering its tenth year. He learns Rohingya and basic English in a learning centre that is careful not to call itself a school. He wants to be a fisherman like his father was. His father sits beside him and says nothing.

This is what the international order looks like when it fails: not in dramatic collapse, but in the slow accumulation of people who fall through the cracks and stay there. The Rohingya were erased from Myanmar's legal framework in 1982. They were erased from their land in 2017. Now they are being erased from international attention, one funding cut at a time.

The camps will still be here in ten years. The children born there will be seventeen. They will speak three languages and belong to no country. They will have lived their entire lives in four metres by three metres of bamboo and tarpaulin. And the international community will still be talking about conditions conducive to return.