‘I Had No Options’: The Rohingya Man Who Smuggled Himself

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YANGON, Myanmar—By Kamal’s own admission, his family used to be “very rich.” His father owned a successful trading business, which sent fish and thanaka—a fragrant cosmetic paste made from tree bark—to be sold in neighboring Bangladesh. Their home in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State in western Myanmar (also known as Burma), was a two-story structure in a busy quarter, and Kamal, a Muslim, taught English at a local church.

But when I met him, he was sitting idly near his new house in a village filled with rickety homes, where the roads and footpaths had been turned to slippery mud by the heavy monsoon. His family were forced to flee Sittwe as roving mobs of Buddhists destroyed the homes of their Muslim neighbors. Violence had convulsed Rakhine State, where the Buddhist majority clashed with the Rohingya community, a minority Muslim group that