A Cry to the Universe: Life Behind Barbed Wires

A Cry to the Universe: Three Decades Behind Barbed Wire

Captured By Saiful Arakani Rohingya Journalist

Mohammed Faisal, 31, is a registered Rohingya refugee from the Nayapara Registered Rohingya Refugee Camp in Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. He is also a Rohingya journalist and human rights defender who works tirelessly for his community. Today, he speaks with tears to the universe his voice shaped by decades of life behind barbed wire, poverty, and despair.

Born into Exile

Over time, the camps became

permanent settlements without permanent solutions generations were born into them, including Mohammed Faisal in 1994 inside the very camp where his parents had arrived a few years earlier. In 1990, Myanmar’s military junta intensified its brutal persecution of the Rohingya people using forced labor, extortion, land confiscation, arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, and mass displacement as tools of oppression.

His father witnessed unimaginable horror, including the killing of his own relatives. Fearing for their lives, Faisal’s parents fled their home in northern Rakhine State, crossing the Naf River into Bangladesh. Alongside tens of thousands of other Rohingya, they sought safety from systematic persecution.

In 1992, the UNHCR and the Government of Bangladesh registered Faisal’s parents as refugees, granting them a place in Nayapara Camp. Yet, “refuge” did not mean freedom.

Life in the Camp: An Open-Air Prison

More than thirty years have passed, but little has changed. Nayapara Camp remains fenced by barbed wire, its streets lined with frail bamboo shelters that collapse in heavy monsoon rains. Roofs of thin plastic sheets melt under scorching summer heat, while bamboo walls fail to block the winter fog and bitter cold.

Food, healthcare, and education remain scarce. The community survives on rations from the World Food Programme (WFP) and when food distribution is delayed, families go hungry. Even today, three decades later, the camp’s residents depend entirely on aid to survive.

The government’s restrictions are severe: Rohingya cannot freely leave the camp, cannot work legally, and cannot access formal education. Faisal reflects on the cost of these barriers:

“If education had been allowed, many Rohingya could have become lawyers, doctors, or engineers people who could rebuild our community. Instead, our dreams have been buried in the camp’s dust.”

Generations of Rohingya children have grown up illiterate, their futures stolen before they began.

Captured By Saiful Arakani Rohingya Journalist

A Father’s Life, A Father’s Death

Faisal’s father grew old behind these fences, never knowing the taste of freedom. Years of hardship weakened his body, and he was eventually diagnosed with lung cancer.

The family searched desperately for treatment, traveling from one hospital to another. But for refugees, healthcare was always out of reach either too costly, unavailable, or denied. His father died in the same camp where he had arrived as a young man, his dream of returning home to Myanmar forever unfulfilled.

A Crisis Without an End

Faisal’s story mirrors that of over 60,000 registered Rohingya refugees who have lived in Bangladesh’s two registered camps Nayapara and Kutupalong for more than three decades.

Since the early 1990s, these camps have been described by many as open-air prisons. Children have grown up without stepping beyond their perimeters. Entire generations have been born, lived, and died within a few square kilometers of fenced land.

Every year brings the same suffering:

Monsoons destroy shelters and spread waterborne diseases.

Winter cold claims the lives of infants and elderly people due to a lack of blankets and proper housing.

Chronic shortages of food, clean water, and healthcare leave the population in constant vulnerability.

Meanwhile, the political deadlock continues: Myanmar refuses to take back the registered refugees, and Bangladesh insists they cannot integrate permanently. This leaves the Rohingya trapped in limbo, stateless and forgotten by much of the world.

A Plea to the Universe

From within the confines of Nayapara Registered Refugee Camp, Mohammed Faisal calls out to the global community:

“Please, take urgent steps to end this endless pain. Let us live as human beings again.”

For over thirty years, the Rohingya in Bangladesh have survived without rights, freedom, or a future. The world has heard their cries, but their suffering continues. It is long past time for a sustainable, just solution one that restores dignity, safety, and hope.

Even after hearing the ICC's provisional measures genocide is going on still.