By Anisur Rahman and Ashish Singh
The Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm recently staged Cox’s Bazar, a work that does not merely depict suffering but compels its audience to confront it. Developed under the Dramaten.Doc initiative and based on field interviews conducted in 2025 by Bangladeshi writer and journalist Debashish Deb, the play reconstructs the lived experiences of Rohingya refugees with an unsettling immediacy. Premiered as a staged reading at Dramatenbaren, it transforms testimony into theatre, and theatre into a moral inquiry that refuses distance.
The setting of these testimonies, Cox’s Bazar, is today the epicentre of one of the most enduring humanitarian crises of our time. More than a million displaced people, nearly half of them children, inhabit a space that was never meant to sustain such density or such duration. They arrived there fleeing persecution in Myanmar, particularly during the violent escalation of 2017. What was initially perceived as a temporary refuge has hardened into a prolonged condition of uncertainty, where the passage of time deepens rather than resolves vulnerability.
The Rohingya are not merely refugees in the conventional sense; they are a people systematically denied belonging. Historically rooted in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, they have been rendered stateless through the denial of citizenship, exclusion from political life, and repeated cycles of violence. In Bangladesh, they survive under humanitarian protection, but survival is not the same as living. They cannot formally work, their access to education is constrained, and their movement is restricted. What emerges is a condition of suspended existence, where neither return nor integration appears possible.
The humanitarian dimensions of this crisis are visible but insufficiently understood. Years of dependence on international aid have created a fragile ecosystem in the camps, one that has begun to erode. Funding cuts in recent years have reduced food rations, strained healthcare services, and curtailed educational initiatives. The consequences are most visible among children, many of whom face chronic malnutrition, stunted development, and a profound absence of opportunity. The deprivation here is not only material; it is temporal. An entire generation is growing up without access to the formative experiences that shape agency, aspiration, and identity.
Yet to view the Rohingya crisis only through the lens of humanitarianism is to overlook its broader political and security implications. The scale and duration of displacement have transformed it into a regional concern with far-reaching consequences. For Bangladesh, hosting such a large refugee population has created sustained pressure on land, infrastructure, and public resources. Local communities, themselves navigating economic precarity, increasingly experience this presence not as a moral imperative but as a structural burden. Social tensions, though often muted, are an inevitable byproduct of prolonged imbalance.
Across the region, including in India and parts of Southeast Asia, the crisis has intersected with questions of border control, migration governance, and internal security. Irregular migration routes have expanded, sometimes linking vulnerable populations to trafficking networks and informal economies. While fears of radicalization are frequently amplified in political discourse, the more immediate reality is one of structural vulnerability, where the absence of legal identity and opportunity can make displaced populations susceptible to exploitation. States, therefore, find themselves navigating a difficult terrain where humanitarian responsibility and security considerations are often framed in opposition.
The absence of a credible political solution in Myanmar remains the central obstacle. Without guarantees of safety, citizenship, and rights, the prospect of voluntary and dignified repatriation remains remote. The crisis thus persists in a state of indefinite deferral, sustained by temporary measures that were never designed for permanence. In such conditions, the line between emergency and normalcy begins to blur, and displacement risks becoming an enduring feature rather than an exception.
It is here that Cox’s Bazar acquires its deeper significance. The play does not offer policy prescriptions or geopolitical analysis. Instead, it rehumanizes a crisis that is often reduced to numbers and narratives. Through fragments of memory, longing, and resilience, it restores to the Rohingya a voice that is frequently mediated or ignored. Each dialogue opens not into resolution but into a question—about responsibility, about justice, about the limits of international will.
The Rohingya question, then, is not confined to the camps of Cox’s Bazar or the borders of Myanmar and Bangladesh. It is a test of the contemporary world’s capacity to reconcile sovereignty with humanity, security with dignity, and compassion with political realism. It forces a reckoning with uncomfortable truths: that humanitarian crises do not exist in isolation, that their consequences spill across borders, and that inaction carries its own form of violence.
For the Rohingya themselves, the future remains suspended between an unsafe homeland and an unwelcoming refuge. Myanmar is the place they continue to imagine as home, yet it is also the source of their displacement. Bangladesh offers safety but not belonging. Between these two poles lies a generation growing up without a clear horizon, their lives shaped by decisions in which they have no voice.
In the end, the question is not only what can be done for the Rohingya, but what their condition reveals about the world that has allowed such a condition to persist.
Source : Counter Currents .ORG