Dr Md Ziaur Rahman on Sunday said the Rohingya have been oppressed since the 1700s because of a failure to rise up against state oppression.
He claimed a lack of formal organizations and networks and resource mobilization to capitalize on political opportunities as the main reason behind this.
Dr Zia, chairman of the Department of Criminology at Dhaka University, came up with the remarks while speaking at a session titled “Failed Resistance and Current Uncertainty of the Rohingya” at the end of a two-day international conference on “Refugees in the Public Imagination: Discourse of (dis)location and (dis)placement”.
Department of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) organized the event where distinguished researchers held sessions on topics such as the refugee narratives, Rohingya oral literature, the history of the Rohingya, and coverage of the Rohingya crisis.
While conducting a plenary session titled “One and Only Figure of the Refugee”, Dr Salimullah Khan, director of Center for Advanced Theory at ULAB, went into great detail on the history behind the Rohingya crisis, stressing on how refugees were often denied their human rights.
“It is important to first define what it means to be a human in order to protect their rights,” he opined.
Mashrur Shahid Hossain, associate professor at the Department of English at Jahangirnagar University, presented a research paper on the Rohingya’s oral literary traditions titled “Ou Anar Foriso: Reading Rohingya Literature and Art vis-a-vis Rohingya Translocation.”
During his presentation, Mashrur mentioned how the Rohingya were discriminated against by the Myanmar nationalists, who used derogatory and racist terms such as “Bangladeshi Kala”—“Kala” is a racist term used to refer to people of South Asian origin, often directed towards the Rohingya.
He said, despite the Myanmar national anthem guaranteeing equal rights to all, the government of Myanmar refused to grant the Rohingya their rights.
During another session on how the Rohingya crisis had been dealt with by the media, titled “Covering the Rohingya,” speakers said the Rohingya were forcefully displaced and their land illegally occupied by locals.
Tanvir Chowdhury, Aljazeera correspondent for Bangladesh, said that most of the Rohingyas said they were too traumatized to even "want to return to Myanmar".
Probash Amin, head of ATN News, said he thought it would take up to 50 years to repatriate the Rohingya back to Myanmar, despite the presence of a bilateral agreement between both countries.
“I am pretty sure that 30,000–50,000 Rohingyas returning would be considered a success and the remaining 950,000 of them will end up living in Bangladesh,” he said, adding that the Rohingya might end up being a security risk in the near future.
Among others, Zahirul Islam Mamun, chief executive editor at ATN Bangla, and Sam Jahan, correspondent for Agence France-Presse, were also present at the panel discussions.