KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh (AFP) – Bloodstains still mark the spot where assassins gunned down Mohib Ullah, an activist who was a leading voice for the 850,000 Rohingya living in fear in Bangladeshi refugee camps.
In the weeks since the murder, a senior member of the now-shellshocked volunteer group that Ullah headed has received phone calls telling him he’ll be next. And he’s not alone.
“They can hunt you down the way they have brazenly shot dead our leader and so many people,” Noor, too frightened to give his real name or be filmed, told AFP.
“They”, he believes, are members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an insurgent group fighting the Myanmar military but also thought to be behind a wave of killings and criminal activity in the camps.
ARSA has denied it killed Ullah.
Most of the Rohingya have been in the camps since 2017 when they fled a brutal military offensive in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where the predominantly Muslim minority are reviled and seen as illegal immigrants.
Refusing to go back until they are assured of security and equal rights, the refugees remain stuck in bamboo-and-tarp shacks with no work, poor sanitation and little education for their children.
Overflowing latrines fill narrow mud lanes with excrement in monsoon season, and fires can rip through the flimsy homes in minutes during the hot summers.
By day the Bangladesh authorities provide some security. But at night the camps become the domain of gangs -- allegedly linked to ARSA -- that traffic millions of dollars worth of methamphetamine from Myanmar.
“The scenario is different as soon as the sun sets,” Israfil, a Rohingya refugee who goes by one name, told AFP.
Working among the chaos and unease in the camps, Ullah and his colleagues quietly documented the crimes that his people suffered at the hands of the Myanmar military, while pressing for better conditions.
The former schoolteacher shot to prominence in 2019 when he organized a protest of around 100,000 people in the camps to mark two years since their exodus.
They saw Ullah as threatening their place as the sole voice representing the Rohingya -- one who was opposed to their violence, his colleagues and rights activists say.
Three weeks after Ullah’s murder in late September, gunmen and machete-wielding attackers slaughtered seven people in an Islamic seminary that had allegedly refused to pay protection money to ARSA.
“The brutal carnage bore all the marks of ARSA. The group previously slaughtered at least two top Islamic clerics because they didn’t back ARSA’s violent struggle,” said a top expatriate Rohingya activist.
“ARSA has carried out the murders to establish its full control in the camps. After the latest carnage, everyone seems to be silenced,” he added, asking to remain anonymous.