How Rohingya refugees are digitally reclaiming their culture

Sufaira Begum, 15, is among an estimated one million Rohingya Muslims who call the world's largest refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox's Bazar their home.

She was very young when she fled with her family from their ancestral land in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017 following a violent ethnic cleansing that saw thousands of Rohingya butchered by rampaging gangs backed by the military.

Childhood memories are already hazy. “I only faintly remember our house, the area…since 2017, this camp is the only home I know,” Begum tells TRT World.

But memories of pain are still fresh in her mind.

Begum, then just seven, saw Myanmar soldiers kill five Rohingya from her village in front of her. This is a memory she wishes to forget.

What she wants to forever carry with her is her Rohingya identity, her culture, her language. Millions of others like her have the same dream.

The largest exodus of the Rohingyas unfolded in August 2017 due to decades of violence, discrimination and persecution in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, forcing more than 742,000 people to seek refuge in Bangladesh. Many other Rohingya sought refuge in other neighbouring countries like Thailand, India, Indonesia and Nepal.

Even in the countries of refuge, they struggle to build their lives – battling lack of job opportunities, education and discrimination.

Cultural crisis

Istanbul-based Mohd. Selim Noor, a Rohingya himself, has never been to Myanmar. Born and brought up in Saudi Arabia before migrating to Türkiye several years ago.

Noor says his parents inculcated strong Rohingya values in him and taught him about his own culture and traditions -- which he now wants the world to recognise and learn about.

To harness their traditions and history, Noor created Zita TV in 2022 - a platform to preserve Rohingya culture and educate a new generation of Rohingya youth by sharing their cultural traditions, music, poetry, traditional cooking, and religious practices.

"My own people's suffering pushed me to preserve our culture digitally as well as promote it for the world to know," says Noor, now a Turkish citizen.

Noor is involved in providing humanitarian aid to his community spread across countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, India, and Nepal.

Noor, who also runs a social welfare organisation to aid his community, feels that their culture was crushed to pieces as the genocide unfolded in their country.

“We may never get our space back in our homeland, those symbols of cultural semblance may be lost forever. So our culture is all we have,” Noor says.

“Rohingyas have lost everything and yet persevered to survive. Our culture must be shared within our community as well as for others to understand and document,” he adds.

Abdul Aziz, a Rohingya refugee student in Istanbul, is a full-time content producer at Zita TV.

“I plan on what kind of videos our creators should make, whether they teach our culture, English lessons, or the documents one needs when applying for a refugee card, citizenship options, etc. The idea is that our community, our people, though stateless, should never feel alone,” Aziz tells TRT World.

Aziz says that they try to keep their content simple and helpful. “Our aim is to educate and entertain our community using our own culture,” says Aziz.

One of the challenges in getting more traffic to the initiatives on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram pages stems from the obstacles that chain their community to illiteracy and poverty.

“Many of our people do not have access to phones and internet, that slows the purpose of our programmes,” he adds.

Sabber Kyaw Min, Director of the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative (ROHRIngya), views the initiative as a creative method of carving a collective Rohingya identity.

Min, himself a refugee in New Delhi, also feels connected to the dispersed Rohingya diaspora through the platform and views Zita as a digital community in itself – packing together information and emotions on digital platforms to create a space where Rohingya can connect with their roots.

With 77k followers on Facebook and 11k subscribers on YouTube, Zita TV has deployed the power of social media to connect with its global audience. The millions of views on both platforms are a testament to its significance for the Rohingya people.

In Cox’s Bazaar, Ro Yassin Abdumonab considers Zita TV his “school”.

“I make it my routine to watch the channel on YouTube. It has Islamic content, traditional Rohingya recipes, English lessons and sports updates, all in our native language, Burmese,” Abdumonab tells TRT World.

Online in exile

Like Noor, Mohammed Rezuwan Khan, a 26-year-old Rohingya refugee and activist living at the Kutupalong camp, is on a mission of his own – collecting folktales from elderly Rohingyas in an attempt to preserve what is left.

After fleeing Myanmar in 2017, he also landed in Bangladesh along with thousands of other refugees.

In 2020, he began this initiative as he realised that the Rohingya cultural heritage, such as folktales and folk songs, was on the brink of being lost.

“I started this initiative to preserve our culture before the old generation of storytellers die. As an indigenous ethnic minority, despite being forcibly driven out of our country, it's imperative for us to preserve our culture and pass it on,” Khan tells TRT World.

Khan records the folktales on audio tape and then transcribes them to text files for publishing as books. His labour of love has resulted in rohingyafolktales.com, an online repository of stories that have been passed down the generations orally.

“Once we preserve them as a book or online, we believe the next generation will have a chance to access them easily in this modern era,” he says.

He feels that the youngsters “should not be a generation at a loss, as we must one day return to our country with safety and dignity and retain our identity as Rohingya,” he adds.

Across the world, the stateless Rohingya are finding ways to move on in life despite the challenges and hardships.

Like Tashmida Johar, who became the first in her community in India to enroll for university education.

Hasena Begum and Roshan Ara, two other Rohingya women, are also seeking to pass on their culture to the children they are raising in exile in Bangladesh and India, respectively.

Begum and Ara feel that Zita TV helps them reconnect to their roots – finding Rohingya recipes and memories that seem to be fading as a stateless community.

“I don’t like it when I can’t recall what certain fruits are called in our native Burmese language. It feels incomplete to live how we have grown up,” Begum says.

Having videos that can connect them with their language, provide them with a sense of belonging and help them experience the digital idea of the Rohingya homeland.

“It is painful to know that Rohingyas are broken across the globe, we need to feel united and need a sense of togetherness to support each other, even if it means sharing content online, watching it with family, and recommending it to others,” says Ara.

While Zita TV aims to preserve Rohingya culture and educate a new generation by sharing cultural traditions, music, poetry, traditional cooking, and religious practices, the community feels that they exist globally as an exiled diaspora, and this reinforces the need to invest interest and time in acquiring solidarity for the community.

For nearly three million Rohingya in exile, these initiatives give them hope and solace as they dream of returning to their homeland one day and living in peace as a community.