A Rohingya leader’s murder highlights rising insecurity in refugee camps

DEATH THREATS did not appear to faze Mohib Ullah. “If I die, I’m fine. I will give my life,” he told reporters in 2019. A science teacher in Myanmar before he and hundreds of thousands of other Rohingya refugees were forced to flee in 2017, the 46-year-old became one of the displaced community’s most prominent voices on the international stage. He compiled databases of Rohingyas killed in Myanmar, organised huge rallies and spoke at the UN. Yet his fame and his resistance to violence also earned him enemies. On September 29th gunmen burst into his shack in the Kutupalong refugee camp in southern Bangladesh and shot him dead.

A persecuted ethnic minority in their native Myanmar, some 700,000 Rohingyas were chased from their homes by the Burmese army and allied militias four years ago. Their accounts of rape, murder, and mutilation shocked the world. Yet the violence did not stop at the border. The sprawling refugee camps in Bangladesh—now home to more than 1m refugees—have become bases for Rohingya militant groups and criminal gangs. The most powerful is the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a cross-border insurgency. (Bangladeshi security forces deny that there are any militants in the camps.)