Beyond Refuge: Empowering Rohingya to Lead Their Own Future
Image by Sébastien Goldberg.
“The vast majority of my people are in refugee camps or in apartheid villages, struggling every day just to make a living… They deserve to have a biography, not someone like me, living in Canada with a decent job in the government,” said Raïss Tinmaung. Tinmaung is Rohingya and when we met last month in a Toronto cafe, we discussed if I should tell his story or not. We agreed that I should, but only if I made it clear that he has more privilege than most people from his community.
Often described as the most persecuted minority in the world, the Rohingya predominantly live in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State. Despite this, the military-junta government labels the Rohingya as foreigners and denies them access to education and passports, blocking travel and leaving them stateless.
Tinmaung’s parents fled Myanmar in 1978, just before Operation Dragon King, the first of several state-sponsored massacres targeting Rohingya people. “If my parents had moved a few months later, I would still be in a refugee camp. I would not have even seen the rest of Bangladesh or Myanmar, let alone any other part of the world… In my team, there are people who have never seen anything outside the refugee camps,” he told me as we sipped our tea.
Tinmaung was born in Chittagong after his parents left Myanmar just before the massacre that drove 200,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladeshi refugee camps. The family later moved to the United Arab Emirates before emigrating to Canada in 2001. Tinmaung now works as a space systems engineer.
In his youth, Tinmaung described himself as a hippie, volunteering overseas in Haiti, South Africa, and Ecuador. In 2015, he visited the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh and launched a small children’s education program. By 2017, as the refugee camp population approached one million, he realized that people needed more than just humanitarian aid; they needed international solidarity and protection from violence. He began advocating for both.
In 2017, Tinmaung founded the Rohingya Human Rights Network and organized concurrent Canada-wide peaceful rallies to raise awareness of the plight of the Rohingya. ”The rallies were small, 200 or 300 people, but we received strong media attention,” he said. The network also collected nearly 100,000 signatures for the revocation of the honorary Canadian citizenship of Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Additionally, their petition to the Federal government to recognize the Rohingya genocide attracted over 100 signatures from leaders in Canadian civil society.
Both campaigns were successful: Canada revoked Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship, and the federal Parliament passed a unanimous motion declaring the situation a genocide.
Tinmaung fears that awareness and support for the Rohingya are waning. He says, “Our government and our societies tend to care for some parts of the world and turn a blind eye to others. For example, we care a lot about Ukraine, but not many care about what is happening in Sudan, Ethiopia, or Palestine. Similarly, not many care about what is happening in Myanmar.”
Tinmaung believes that the survival of the Rohingya depends on their own leadership. “Aid only goes so far. It is crucial that we provide aid that helps people stand on their own feet,” he said. Inside the camps and villages, Tinmaung’s team works on human rights projects, producing videos on issues like state-sponsored violence and documenting human rights violations. This work helps them build the capacity to narrate their own stories. Tinmaung emphasizes that the budget needed for these programs is minimal compared to the vast sums spent on multinational aid, saying, “We just need a little bit of support to build the capacity of the Rohingya so they can stand on their own feet with pride and dignity.”
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