'Cox’s Bazar Is a Cage, Not a Refuge': The Rohingya Deserve More Than Survival

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

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.

Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh.

(Photo: Sanam Sutirath Wazir)

'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.

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?

Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh.

(Photo: Sanam Sutirath Wazir)

'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.