Resilient and resourceful, Rohingya diaspora carve out new lives

Driven from Myanmar over decades, Rohingya Muslims have been labelled the most persecuted people on earth. But resilience and ingenuity have led members of the stateless community to carve out new lives -- everywhere from refugee camps in Bangladesh to the hospitals of Europe.

Many fled Myanmar as children. Some have been granted refugee status, others live in the shadows with no legal status or protection.

Half a million of the Muslim minority remain in their ancestral homeland of Rakhine state inside Myanmar -- the country that denies them citizenship -- in camps or hemmed in by hostile neighbours.

Their history is of oppression. But success stories are being forged and those who have escaped are often willing to give back to those left behind.

A "proud Yorkshire boy", Nijam Uddin Mohammed arrived with his family in Bradford, in northern England, in 2008 after 17 years in a Bangladeshi refugee camp.

He is 36, or close enough.

Like many Rohingya, his parents were barred from registering his birth in Myanmar, part of a bureaucratic drive to erase their existence.

As a result, around half of Bradford's 400-strong Rohingya community have been officially given the same date of birth: January 1.

"My father, mum, my wife, my brothers, my grandmother, we all have the same birthday party," he says, joking about the celebration expenses saved.

Nijam learned English and now drives a taxi and works as a part-time interpreter for the National Health Service.

But as the head of the British Rohingya Community charity he says his real calling is advocacy work for his people.

"I hope my children will (also) work for the Rohingya people to free them," he says.

Freedom is a long way off for the hundreds of thousands of new refugees who have poured into the camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, since last year, driven out by a merciless Myanmar army crackdown.

Their lives are on pause. But Mohammad Selim is refusing to waste time. Inside his mud walled hut deep in the Kutupalong megacamp, he is teaching eight-year-old daughter Nasima Akhtar taekwondo.

Selim, now 34, was a Taekwondo champion in his youth but as a Rohingya was denied use of official sports facilities in Myanmar.

So for 18 years he crossed between Bangladesh and Myanmar to fight, ultimately representing his adopted country before violence made return to Rakhine impossible.

"We're poor and have never been given respect," he says.

"But after I entered this sport, I learned what respect is... so I'm teaching it to my daughter," he says.

Nasima, whose shyness evaporates when she trains, wants to follow her dad in competitive bouts.

"When I grow up I want to fight," she says.

Life was a battle from a very young age says Anita Schug, who was forced from Myanmar in the early 1980s but soared through education in Europe to become a neurosurgeon, working in German hospitals.

"If others worked 100 per cent to achieve their goals I had to work at least twice as much as them," the 37-year-old says from her current home in Solothurn, Switzerland.

"I got used to the challenges and as a result I went for the challenging tasks. Neurosurgery, I saw it as a challenge and that's why I went for it."
"I don't want young people to go through my life." - The Activist -
"Education gives people hope."