Transforming Trauma in Rohingya Communities
The diverse and evolving impacts of memorialization within the framework of transitional justice is evidenced in GIJTR’s work with Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, where it is building the capacity of local documenters to record and share their experiences of human rights violations in their home country of Myanmar. Shortly after beginning this work in January 2019, GIJTR and local partners saw an immediate need to support women refugees in particular as not only are their perspectives often ignored in the camps, but they face deep-seated challenges including domestic violence and social isolation. To this end, GIJTR developed programming that combined traditional MHPSS with art-based memorialization initiatives, engaging over 600 Rohingya refugees in dialogue circles to share their life stories and produce memorialization projects for wide dissemination within 10 camps in local exhibitions and in related exhibitions in Dhaka, Chittagong and other major cities in Bangladesh, as well as in Bangkok and Jakarta. Through the art initiatives, which include paintings, community-produced videos, embroidery, patchwork and bodymaps, survivors—a large proportion of whom are women—share their experiences of the genocide they experienced in Myanmar, their longing for their homeland and their life in the refugee camps. Participants report that preserving their stories and having them heard within the community is very meaningful personally, but also an effective way of sharing their experiences with the host community and international actors to build connection, empathy and solidarity—all crucial elements of advocacy and developing closer engagements with accountability mechanisms. Through such memorialization initiatives, community participants also develop the trust and confidence needed to support more formal documentation processes. In this case, these memorialization efforts led to robust efforts to formally document experiences of refugees through a GIJTR-facilitated oral history archive, community-led documentary films and a continuous dialogue with accountability mechanisms based on information provided by memorialization initiatives. Alongside local partners, GIJTR supported women in leadership roles and in documenter recruitment. One documenter reported: “I work with
women especially. Women have so much to say and before never had a chance to express themselves to anyone.” Another refugee and participant explained: “Women should have the freedom to make decisions about their lives so that they may at least maintain their dignity, and we realized that we need to educate our community members about gender equality and gender-based violence.” GIJTR’s programming in Cox’s Bazar raises awareness of the forced displacement of nearly 1 million Rohingya from Myanmar, 85% of whom are women and children, and equips them to advocate as a community explicitly against the genocide and Myanmar’s attempts to destroy the Rohingya as a people. What began with the creation of safe spaces to share the stories of dozens of women in the refugee camps in Cox´s Bazar became a determined and strong campaign of over 300 women to strengthen a Rohingya-led movement for accountability and change.
GIJTR builds the capacity of Rohingya women to document, in both written and visual ways, the woefully underreported challenges faced by women in the camps, including economic disparities and sexual and gender- based violence, to ensure accountability in the future and challenge patriarchal norms more generally.
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GIJTR’s Impact In Depth: Victims and Conflict-Affected Communities
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