Under the tormenting sun in Teknaf, on the southeastern tip of Bangladesh, Ahmed puts us straight: it is really all about love. His wife stands next to him in his tarpaulined shop in the unofficial Kutupalong refugee camp in southern Bangladesh. He came here, Ahmed says, to marry his childhood sweetheart, fleeing what Physicians for Human Rights, a watchdog group, describes as 'flagrant and widespread human rights abuses' that condemned Ahmed to having to pay an exorbitant bribe just to marry. Today, his 18-month-old baby crawls over small packets of paan and snacks on sale, mimicking his father's voice unknowingly, describing the indescribable – how Rohingya women were told by the Burmese military that, in order to marry, they would have to have an implant rendering them infertile.
The Dhaka government has long been aware of the ethnic tensions in the Rohingya's native Arakan state on western Burma. Indeed, by all accounts, the junta has actively fostered this situation over the years; for decades, the Rohingya community – Muslims in a Buddhist-dominated country – has been denied even the most basic of citizenship rights. But in the run-up to Burma's national elections last November, evidently in the hopes of garnering votes, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) promised the Rohingya the citizenship rights they crave.
Today, Salim Ullah of the exile-based Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO) describes these as 'lots of sweet promises'. He notes that in Maung Daw, the regional centre from where the Rohingya hail, the central mosque is still un-repaired, a symbol of the community's difference from the majority Buddhists. While the mosque had long ago fallen into disrepair, fixing it had reportedly been forbidden by the government. Prior to the election, however, the USDP had promised the community that the mosque would be fixed, in an attempt to combat the local (allegedly anti-Rohingya) party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party.
Instead, the military is today busily constructing a 300 km fence between Bangladesh and Burma. Like Israel's wall bordering the West Bank, this will be a monument to divided peoples – an electrified fence carrying current between two territories where very few houses can boast of electric lights. For the most part, Bangladeshis seem somewhat bemused by what is taking place across the border. From the Bangladeshi side, Burma seems a dark and confusing place; but the Burmese border force, known as Nasaka, is viewed with trepidation, its fence and security posts ominously overlooking the sleepy Bangladeshi villages.