“If We Speak Together, It’s More Powerful”: A Rohingya Activist’s Journey from Genocide to Advocacy
The following is an interview I conducted with Maung Sawyedollah, a refugee from Myanmar who currently attends NYU. This piece was for the Columbia Human Rights Magazine: CU Continents.
In 2017, over a million Rohingya were forced to flee their homes in Myanmar as the military launched a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Among them was Maung Sawyeddollah, then a teenager, who escaped to Bangladesh on foot with his family. In this powerful conversation, he shares his journey of survival, the realities of life in exile, and how he’s transforming personal tragedy into a movement for justice, awareness, and human rights.
Can you tell us about yourself and what led you to become an activist for the Rohingya cause?
It was actually because of my personal experience and the situation I have faced. During 2017, our people were forced to leave the country [because of] different human rights abuses, discriminations, [and] a campaign to eradicate the Rohingya people from the world. I left the country with my family and about 1 million Rohingya people and took refuge in Bangladesh. I started to realize the difference between my home country and life in the refugee camp. That is something I can say motivated me… through my commitment to bring change because of the situation I was seeing, I was motivated to become an activist. I started my activism [in] 2018 just after one year of becoming a refugee in Bangladesh.
How did the fact that Myanmar doesn’t recognize the Rohingya ethnic group affect your youth?
When I was in Myanmar, I never realized we were under such human rights abuses and…discriminatory policies. I only started realizing it after coming to the refugee camps because in Myanmar we were kept in situations that I even accepted maybe this is how life for other people is. I also have lots of Burmese friends and friends that are not Rohingya. We even used to play together, go to schools together, but life for them is very different than life for us in terms of rights and responsibilities. Because of not being Rohingya, he [his friend], can go to the higher studies but I cannot go because I’m Rohingya. Playing together, even enjoying our life together, he can travel to different towns, and I cannot go because of my identity. Let’s say we are in Manhattan, let’s say I want to go to Queens or Brooklyn, there’s no restrictions for me here. In Myanmar, [if Myanmar were Manhattan] I couldn’t even go to Brooklyn. Also, no one can apply for a government job. We also had Rohingya in the parliament and serving in the military, but they [Burmese government and military] revoked it systemically.
Could you tell me more about your experience during the 2017 Rohingya genocide and in the refugee camps?
During 2017, there was a wave of violence taking place in Myanmar. Everything that I used to see was very unusual in my own village. I’d never seen lots of military come into the villages. They were arresting people, they were taking people away from their village, and people started moving from one village to another. Also, social media played a very significant role in shaping our own understanding of the situation because we [got] used to seeing killings and slaughtering of people on social media. We also saw the military burning the camps of the Rohingya people. So, it made people more [scared], so we left. People were just leaving everything behind and moving to the border of Bangladesh. Soon after witnessing those things, we started also witnessing the same situations coming to our own village and we joined the people to [go] towards Bangladesh. It was, I think, 11 September 2017, I crossed the border and took shelter in Bangladesh. It took 15 days to walk to reach the border because we were walking on foot and not using the usual route where people walked. We were crossing mountain after mountain because we were scared the military would do something [on the usual routes], so we were using unusual routes.
Can you describe your process and intentions in creating the Rohingya Students Network?
One day with some of my friends we were talking about changes in our life and also trying to understand what our futures look like. It was about to become just one year after coming to the refugee camp and we decided to commemorate the first anniversary of Rohingya genocide day. I played a very main role in organizing and designing the program. It was a very successful event and commemoration. Just after doing that, I realized I can really do something if I try. That was when the idea to establish Rohingya Students Network because that was the time I realized if I speak, it’s powerful, but if we speak together, it’s more powerful.
I read in your piece, “Help Rohingya get access to Higher Education on this Human Rights Day,” that we must call upon the international community to recognize the Human Rights violations (UDHR article 26*) and (ICESCR article 13) in what ways have you seen this violation on education affect the community?
In my understanding, it only requires 10 years to destroy a generation of a community by restricting education [from] them. In the case of Rohingya, higher education was restricted for the Rohingya people since 2012, no Rohingya were allowed to go to a university or a college course. Since then, it’s been more than 10 years. That means a generation of the Rohingya community is already destroyed. Further restrictions to this community might cause the destruction of the entire community. Now, the Rohingya people aren’t able to raise their voices or even understand what is really happening in Myanmar. I mean, if I do not understand what human rights are, how will I understand that the things happening to me are human rights abuses? Lots of people didn’t understand that, and there might be people who used to understand those things, but they were just jailed or killed and targeted. That’s the first thing: educational restriction was used to carry genocide against the Rohingya to make us silent, it’s a slow-burning genocide. We reached Bangladesh and it’s the same here – no education for the Rohingya. No one has enough ability to do something for themselves. Forget about their future, even in the present they cannot do anything for themselves because of the lack of education. People do not have a possible option to dream for a better future.
*UDHR Article 26: Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Since this call-for-action, have you seen any progress in the educational disparities in Rohingya? Other than your 1st project achievement through the Rohingya Student Network.
At the Rohingya Student Network, we have two main objectives. The first one is empowerment- empowering our community which improved education awareness, including higher education. The second objective is advocacy – using those resources and empowered people to bring change. Regarding our empowerment objective, as of now, we do not have any schools or higher education initiatives we’ve taken. What we do right now is take small initiatives to offer training programs and awareness sessions to the people. We have been continuously advocating for the recognition of our work. Even when we say the Rohingya Student Network, it’s not a registered network or organization. We do not have the revenue to register the network and get appropriate funding for necessary financial support.
Your blog posts on your personal website are very powerful. Did your blog work as an outlet and escape from the tragedies you were facing?
My very main purpose was just to preserve all the suffering of my people and situation I am seeing. The next one is to raise awareness for people to really understand what is happening to the Rohingya people. I also know it’s more powerful if people can have a voice through our own words, that’s why I also took the initiative to write on my blog posts and Facebook.
It’s widely reported that the Rohingya have faced forced recruitment by the military junta and the Arakan Army. You have advocated for the establishment of safe zones in Arakan. Could you elaborate on the abuses the Rohingya have endured at the hands of the Arakan Army?
Before the genocide in 2017, it was only the Myanmar military who were taking different campaigns and initiatives to victimize the Rohingya people. During 2017, a big number of Rohingya people left the country so the military was [less effective] on their agenda. Now, the Arakan army* is a resistant group in Myanmar fighting against the military. Now they are about to gain control of the Arakan state. Now we are witnessing the Arakan army doing the same, or worse, than the Myanmar military to the Rohingya people. Even before the Arakan army gained control of Arakan, their agenda was very, very much against the Rohingya people. They want the Rohingya to be under their control; mainly all I can say is it’s a power play. They do not want the Rohingya to stay in Myanmar independently, they do not want the Rohingya to stay in Arakan. In Arakan, there are three main townships Rohingya people stay in where they are the majority: Buthidaung, Maungdaw, and Rathedaung. But the Arakan army doesn’t want this. They used to recognize the Rohingya people to get support and international attention. But now when they [Arakan] gain some power in the States, they no longer say that the Rohingya are the Rohingya. They say, ‘these people are not from Myanmar, they are from Bangladesh, they just came here illegally, so there is no way to accept these people. They do not have a right to be here.’ We cannot say it’s because of the military [Burmese], because they no longer have control in Arakan. It’s the Arakan army that is doing this victimizing even more than the Myanmar military.
* Arakan is a state in Myanmar.
You have called for U.S. legislators to recognize Meta’s role in the Rohingya genocide. In what ways do Meta’s policies and algorithms on Facebook and Instagram contribute to many countries’ ignorance of this issue and the spread of harmful rhetoric?
Before filing this complaint with the SEC*, I came to understand some other cases taking place. Mainly, Meta uses their policy to profit from conflict zones. What I can definitely say is they have designed algorithms used to prioritize some content and deprioritize other content. So, in most cases, Meta is doing this by spreading hate and misinformation and it’s very easy for this hate to turn [from] online to offline. They sometimes claim it is free speech; what I claim to the matter is not about free speech. When it comes to the hateful content it’s a little bit contradictory with free speech. But my complaint and my argument with Meta is not about that and not about hate speech only. It’s about prioritization – they prioritize some content, and they do not prioritize other content, that is my argument. In the case of Rohingya, they prioritized the content that is against Rohingya because if there is a post against Rohingya, lots of people from the country react to that, and people reacting to a post means profit to Meta.
* The SEC is the US Securities and Exchange Commission, an independent U.S. government agency responsible for protecting investors from fraud by requiring institutions to provide investors with accurate financial reports, risk assessments, and registration statements.
Could you elaborate on the specific misrepresentations you believe Meta made to its shareholders regarding its role in the 2017 atrocities against the Rohingya?
Meta is required to make annual reports to the SEC, so in the report that Meta submitted to the SEC, they presented that everything is fine in Myanmar. Even before the 2017 genocide, a lot of human rights organizations warned Meta that they will contribute to the genocide of the Rohingya people. Meta never listened to the warning and continued to do the same and on some level, they even acknowledged that they failed to control their business. They misrepresented the situation not only to the SEC but [to] their shareholders as well.
What message do you have for Meta's shareholders and the general public regarding corporate responsibility in situations like this?
I believe no shareholders would want to be contributing to genocide and taking a path to victimize people. So, what I believe is those people are not aware of what exactly happened. For me as a Rohingya and a victim of the genocide contributed by Meta, we are demanding a remedy from Meta for their contribution to our suffering. I would also want the shareholders to strongly extend on that and take the sides of the truth to pay a remedy to the Rohingya people. Also, for Meta to design a policy that they will no longer contribute that way to other people so that no other people in the world suffer the way the Rohingya suffered because of a tech company.
What do you think of recent legal efforts made by the International Court of Justice? What do you hope to see from them?
For me, this court requires effort from different sides and also takes a longer time, but still, I do have a very strong hope that it will definitely give something good to the Rohingya people. So, two cases, one at ICC* and another at ICJ*. In ICC the office of the prosecutor already requested an arrest warrant, but it’s still a nonissue. The cases are still unprocessed in both courts, but there are also some limitations of the courts and restrictions that I see in legal barriers because these courts are only courts, they can also issue a statement. I cannot see a very realistic solution in that path, but it will be a kind of recognition of the sufferings of the Rohingya people and encourage people to support us.
*ICC is the International Criminal Court.
*ICJ is the International Court of Justice.
What does the next step look like for you?
As soon as I complete [my degree] at NYU, I am thinking of taking a stab at my master’s in human rights - which I plan to do at Columbia. After completing my master's, I have some different ideas for myself, but nothing is fixed. I plan to work within the national government in Myanmar. The second thing is working with my own organization, the Rohingya Student Network, to make it larger. The third thing is to work within humanitarian response with some UN organizations.
In your opinion, what does true justice look like for the Rohingya people?
No one can offer true justice. No one can offer the things they have already lost. Still, justice can heal some things for victims. Personally, for me, true justice for our community means for the Rohingya to live peacefully in Myanmar with their equal rights, responsibilities, and dignity.
What is the first thing you’d do upon returning to your homeland?
The first thing I want to do after returning to my community is just talk with people. Arranging different programs and meetings to talk with people and understand what really has changed since I left, while sharing information on what we can do for the community.
Works Cited
“Home | INTERNATIONAL COURT of JUSTICE.” Www.icj-Cij.org, www.icj-cij.org/home.
International Criminal Court. “International Criminal Court.” Icc-Cpi.int, 2025, www.icc-cpi.int/.
Pavey, Andy. “Understanding the Arakan Army • Stimson Center.” Stimson Center, 21 Apr. 2023, www.stimson.org/2023/understanding-the-arakan-army/.
United Nations. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” United Nations, United Nations, 1948,www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.
