25-08-2023, 07:47 PM
Maung Sawyeddollah
Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh
Published On 25 Aug 2023
25 Aug 2023
......
When I was a child, there was no communal violence in our lives and we had no major problems with our neighbours, even though we were Muslim Rohingya and they were Buddhist Rakhine.
......
For the past six years, ...... Our life here is a daily struggle. We often do not have enough food or clean water. There have been fires, there have been killings. We do not feel safe here.
How did we end up here?
I blame Facebook, its parent company Meta, and the man behind it all, Mark Zuckerberg, for helping create the conditions that allowed the Myanmar military to unleash hell upon us. The social media company allowed anti-Rohingya sentiments to fester on its pages. Its algorithms promoted disinformation that eventually translated into real-life violence.
Sure, the history of tensions between Rohingya and Rakhine communities in Myanmar is long. But, in my personal experience, there was no substantial day-to-day animosity between our peoples until smartphones, and Facebook, entered into our lives and allowed politicians, bigots and opportunists to propagate hate against my people in real time.
I realised that Facebook could be a tool for hate for the first time in 2012, when I was just 11 years old. A group of Rohingya was accused of raping and killing a Buddhist girl. That heinous crime, to my knowledge, has never been solved. But lack of evidence did not stop people from blaming it on our entire community. Hate speech against my people became commonplace in Facebook posts. It was around then that my warm friendships with my Rakhine neighbours began to cool.
A few years later, in late 2016, the anti-Rohingya sentiment fuelled by Facebook, and the persecution that it encouraged and legitimised, started to have a direct impact on my family.
My father and some other financially stable Rohingya were falsely accused of attacking a police station and handed big fines. My uncle Abusufian and his son Busha were arrested for not paying their fine and jailed without trial.
By then, hateful and Islamophobic posts and messages about Rohingya had become commonplace on Facebook. I saw messages calling on people to come together to “save the country and kick out the illegal ‘Bengalis’”. One particularly hateful message stated, “The birth rate of the illegals is very high. If we let it continue, soon the president of our country will have a beard.” The days of playing chinlone with my Rakhine friends were truly over.
Full article at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/...e-rohingya
Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh
Published On 25 Aug 2023
25 Aug 2023
......
When I was a child, there was no communal violence in our lives and we had no major problems with our neighbours, even though we were Muslim Rohingya and they were Buddhist Rakhine.
......
For the past six years, ...... Our life here is a daily struggle. We often do not have enough food or clean water. There have been fires, there have been killings. We do not feel safe here.
How did we end up here?
I blame Facebook, its parent company Meta, and the man behind it all, Mark Zuckerberg, for helping create the conditions that allowed the Myanmar military to unleash hell upon us. The social media company allowed anti-Rohingya sentiments to fester on its pages. Its algorithms promoted disinformation that eventually translated into real-life violence.
Sure, the history of tensions between Rohingya and Rakhine communities in Myanmar is long. But, in my personal experience, there was no substantial day-to-day animosity between our peoples until smartphones, and Facebook, entered into our lives and allowed politicians, bigots and opportunists to propagate hate against my people in real time.
I realised that Facebook could be a tool for hate for the first time in 2012, when I was just 11 years old. A group of Rohingya was accused of raping and killing a Buddhist girl. That heinous crime, to my knowledge, has never been solved. But lack of evidence did not stop people from blaming it on our entire community. Hate speech against my people became commonplace in Facebook posts. It was around then that my warm friendships with my Rakhine neighbours began to cool.
A few years later, in late 2016, the anti-Rohingya sentiment fuelled by Facebook, and the persecution that it encouraged and legitimised, started to have a direct impact on my family.
My father and some other financially stable Rohingya were falsely accused of attacking a police station and handed big fines. My uncle Abusufian and his son Busha were arrested for not paying their fine and jailed without trial.
By then, hateful and Islamophobic posts and messages about Rohingya had become commonplace on Facebook. I saw messages calling on people to come together to “save the country and kick out the illegal ‘Bengalis’”. One particularly hateful message stated, “The birth rate of the illegals is very high. If we let it continue, soon the president of our country will have a beard.” The days of playing chinlone with my Rakhine friends were truly over.
Full article at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/...e-rohingya