Unkind Cut
THE USUAL BASE FOR INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISTS covering the Rohingya crisis is a hotel by the beach in Cox’s Bazar, a Bangladeshi resort town some sixty kilometres north of the vast refugee camps at Kutupalong and Balukhali. Every morning, they pile into SUVs, vans or pickup trucks, and join the stream of traffic taking aid workers, human-rights experts and other out-of-towners southwards. The typical media team bound for the camps includes a driver, a reporter, a photographer, sometimes a cameraman or two, and, almost always, a local journalist as an assistant. The local journalists—“fixers” in the lingo of the international media—are typically possessed of multiple talents. Conversant in English, Bangla, and, preferably, the Rohingya language as well, they serve as translators and guides, manage logistics and dispense security advice. They must be savvy and well-networked enough to arrange any required permissions, to identify relevant sources, to persuade refugees to trust complete strangers with the details of their present and past. Beyond that, they must be bridges across cultural divides—able to decipher and explain clashing manners and contexts, to know just which words to use, and which never to utter, when translating questions and answers. These are the unsung heroes of international journalism, essential to the work of foreign correspondents, but too often not credited and badly paid.
I first visited Cox’s Bazar and started speaking with local journalists while reporting for The Hindu in mid 2018. At the time, it had been less than a year since August 2017, when targeted looting, killing and rape by military and militia forces in nearby Myanmar sparked a mass exodus of Rohingya that filled the camps to overflowing. Global interest in the Rohingya was still at a peak, helped by a flood of reporting from the camps on their expulsion and escape, and on their new predicament as refugees. When I returned late that year, and again in August 2019 to report for a host of international publications, the world’s interest was somewhat waning, though the international media continued to report from the camps in a regular stream. Between trips, and from the very start of the exodus, I followed the coverage closely as the Rohingya crisis became one of the most widely reported humanitarian stories of the last decade. Already on my first trip, amid the expansive reporting up to that point, it was hard to miss a recurring fixation on one theme in particular.
In 2018, I asked three established local journalists in Cox’s Bazar about the kinds of stories they were most often approached to work on. Between them, the three had worked with over a hundred media organisations and freelance journalists since the Rohingya exodus began. All three of them, separately, took less than a second to give me the same answer: stories on sexual violence.
One local journalist counted on his fingers the specific types of refugees he was most often asked to find: survivors of rape, of gang rape, of other sexual violence, survivors driven into sex work or trafficked into sex slavery, women who live with domestic violence.
A second local journalist recalled translating an interview with a survivor of gang rape for a German reporter who insisted on knowing whether the survivor had been held down by five men or seven. The local journalist told me that when she suggested the question might be inappropriate, the German reporter “told me I was not a journalist, and my job was to simply translate.” The local journalist insisted that part of the job was to sensitise outsiders to the Rohingya community’s trauma and conservative Muslim social code, and to flag improper queries. She never worked with the German reporter again.
On another occasion, when visiting a designated “child-friendly space,” a British journalist insisted that this local journalist ask a young girl if she had been raped. The girl’s mother was within earshot, and, the local journalist remembered, she “told me her daughter is too young for this inappropriate question.” The British journalist, unfazed, insisted that the local journalist translate another question: when was the girl going to get married? The mother, by then extremely upset, “asked me if I would ask the same question to children in my community. She said that they bring their children to the child-friendly space because this was a safe place, where children were supposed to be playing.” The local journalist recalled that the British journalist had asked to go to a child-friendly space “to be a fly-on-the-wall, and see what the community does inside these spaces. There was no mention of asking them about rape.”
A third local journalist remembered working with a male photojournalist who insisted that she ask a rape survivor with a bullet
