Abu Toyoub was born in a camp he has never left, to parents who fled a country he has never seen. For 35 years, the only home he has known is a cluster of bamboo and tarpaulin shelters in Kutupalong, inside the sprawl of refugee settlements that ring Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh. He has no passport. No birth certificate that any state recognises. No nationality. However, when he tries to describe his feelings, he does not reach for the language of pity.
“The words I would use are ‘invisible’ and ‘innocent criminal’. Not because people cannot see me, but because the systems that define a person’s existence do not recognise me. I was born in a refugee camp, and for 35 years, I have lived without a nationality, a passport, or a legal identity.”
He describes his existence in candid terms: “Sometimes it feels as though I am living in an open-air prison, like a criminal surrounded by barbed wire, where every step is restricted, and every aspiration must fight through another barrier.”
In one sense, none of this makes Toyoub’s story unusual. Roughly 1.2 million Rohingya refugees are sheltering in Cox’s Bazar, according to recent aid agency figures, and most carry some version of the same story: They’ve been denied citizenship by their home country, barred from moving freely in the country they are sheltering, building whatever life they can inside a camp Bangladeshi law doesn’t fully let them work in or leave. Toyoub has done more with his circumstances than most; a university degree, a youth organisation he helped to start, and years of human rights advocacy. His story is worth telling, not because it rare; it’s common. It’s just that the world stopped looking.
The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from Rakhine state in western Myanmar. In 1982, Myanmar’s military government passed a citizenship law that excluded the Rohingya from its list of recognised national ethnic groups, rendering most of them stateless overnight in the country their families had lived for generations. Decades of discrimination, movement restrictions, and violence followed, culminating in the military’s “clearance operations” in Rakhine state launched in August 2017. The International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor later found a reasonable basis to believe that the operations forcibly deported an estimated 600,000 to one million Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh, alongside allegations of killings, sexual violence, and the destruction of entire villages.
Toyoub’s parents had fled to Bangladesh in 1991, during an earlier round of persecution, years before the world started paying attention to the Rohingya problem. He was born in Kutupalong, a camp that would later swell into the largest refugee settlement on earth.
“My parents often spoke about Myanmar, not as a country on a map, but as a home they lost. They told me stories about villages, farmland, neighbours, and a life that existed before persecution forced them to flee. My mother once told me she wore a certain type of cloth on her wedding day that she could not find here.”
He has never set foot in the country his family calls home.
“Myanmar is a place I know only through words or stories of loss, displacement, and survival. It is a country that decided people like me do not belong there,” he says.
“The strongest feeling I have about it is not longing; it is anger at what was done to my family and to hundreds of thousands of people simply because of who they were,” Toyoub adds.
As a child, Toyoub decided he wanted to be a lawyer. “I watched injustice happen around me and wondered why some people were protected by laws while others were ignored by them,” he says.
“I imagined a future where I could stand in a courtroom and speak for people whose voices were never heard.”
Getting into a classroom took more than ambition. Rohingya children in the camps face many barriers to formal education outside informal learning centres. To enrol Toyoub in a Bangladeshi government school beyond the camp, his family needed an intermediary, a woman who had worked for an NGO in the camp and knew someone on the school’s admission committee. They also needed money to pay the clerk.
“Without a bribe there was no entry,” Toyoub says, adding that he remembers that first day mostly for how afraid he was.
“Most children arrive in school carrying books and excitement. I arrived carrying fear as well. No one was cruel to me that first day, but I could feel that I was just being tolerated, not welcomed.”
The starkest moment of his education came two days before a Class 8 board model examination, when a local newspaper published a report identifying him as a Rohingya student illegally attending a Bangladeshi school.
“Suddenly, the head teacher came into the hall and called out my name loudly. I stood up. In front of everyone, he told me to leave the examination hall because my identity had been exposed in the newspaper. I asked him what I was supposed to do. He simply said there was nothing he could do. I gathered my pen, ruler, and papers and walked out.”
What happened next, by his account, wasn’t a breakdown. It was quieter than that, and worse.
“Outside the school, I sat on the road near the gate. I did not cry, but I felt empty. More than anger, I felt a painful sense of confirmation. It was as if the world had finally said openly what it had been showing me for years: that no place was truly mine. I could study hard, follow the rules, and earn my seat like everyone else, yet it could still be taken away because of who I was.”
He went home and broke down in his mother’s arms. “That moment still hurts to remember,” he says, “not just the exam, but the feeling that my effort was never enough, no matter how hard I tried.”
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He went back to the school the following academic year, through what he describes only as “an unofficial arrangement after a difficult confrontation with the head teacher”. Asked why he didn’t simply give up, his answer is unsentimental.
“Because if I stopped, the discrimination would win, and stopping meant staying exactly where I was, and I had already seen what that looked like for a boy of my age in the camp with no ambition, no movement, no future. That was not a grand act of defiance. That was practical. Education became more than a personal goal; it became an act of resistance.”
Toyoub eventually completed a bachelor’s degree through the DAFI scholarship programme (Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative) in Bangladesh. This is a higher education scholarship funded primarily by the German government and implemented by the UN refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For four years, he lived in the town of Cox’s Bazar and studied, being careful to conceal his Rohingya identity to avoid being detained or questioned by police.
On graduating, his first thoughts were not of himself, but of his parents.
“I thought about the sacrifices they made. Especially, I thought of my mother’s face when I left for school as a young child, the way she would check that my uniform was straight even though she had never been to school herself. She made sacrifices I only understood later. I wanted my parents to hold that certificate; not to read it, but just to hold it. Because they had carried everything that led to it.”
“I also thought about one of my close childhood friends from our block in the camp,” Toyoub added. “He had stopped studying because his family needed him to work to help feed them. He was more talented and brighter than me in some ways. However, he just did not get the same opening I did.”
That gap between talent and opportunity stayed with him. On June 1, 2020, he and his two friends, Farid and Shofique, were sitting beside a camp playground, talking about how many capable young Rohingya were being left behind. That conversation later became SURD — the Students Union for Rohingya Development.
“We asked ourselves a simple question: if nobody is creating opportunities for us, why can’t we create some ourselves?”
That belief, that they could build for themselves what no one else would, became the foundation of SURD. But belief in an institution is one thing; belief in yourself is another. We asked him what it looks like when that belief reaches an individual child.
He did not overstate its impact: “The structural problems remain,” he says, but he has watched something shift in how children in the camp talk about their own futures. “When children never see someone like themselves succeed, success feels imaginary. I have met young students who told me, ‘If you can do it, maybe I can too’.”
Toyoub has since been admitted to a graduate programme at the University of Manitoba in Canada to study under Dr Kjell Anderson, a researcher whose work uses survivor testimony, including graphic novels, to document mass atrocities. For Toyoub, this isn’t just an academic fit; it’s family history.
“The Rohingya crisis is not something I have studied from the outside; it is my family’s life. A formal report or a UN resolution reaches people who are already in the room. But a graphic novel can reach someone who would never pick up a policy paper. That is not just academic work for me; it is my life.”
He remembers reading the admission email at night in the camp, the page loading slowly over a weak internet connection.
“I read the first few lines and stopped. I read them again, four times, because I could hardly believe it was real, and then I cried. I am not ashamed to say that.”
But the offer comes with a catch that matters enormously for a stateless applicant: Manitoba doesn’t guarantee financial aid or a study permit, and as a refugee, Toyoub doesn’t qualify for a student loan in Bangladesh or Canada. He has to raise US$21,000 by September 2026 just to take up a place he’s already earned.
“I have overcome things that should have stopped me. Displacement, statelessness, being removed from examination halls, having no documents the world recognises, and now, the thing that might stop me is a bank transfer.”
Asked what it felt like to have outlasted persecution, exclusion, and 35 years of camp confinement, only to be stopped now by a deadline, Toyoub says he isn’t giving up. He does not sound defeated.
“Unlike discrimination or statelessness, funding is something that can be solved through solidarity and opportunity. I have not come this far to stop now. … What stands between September and me is not my capability. It is a gap the international community could close if it chose to. I am asking them to choose to.”
What stands out in Toyoub’s account is how ordinary the obstacles appear to any ordinary person. To apply for one scholarship, he needed a certified copy of his degree certificate from his university’s exam office located outside the camp. To leave the camp, he needed a movement pass, which took some time to be issued, to clear the checkpoints along the road.
“By the time I had it and travelled to the office, the deadline to get the certified certificate had passed. Deadlines come and go while I am still trying to obtain paperwork or permissions. Many opportunities are technically open to everyone but practically inaccessible to refugees. The challenge is not a lack of talent. It is a lack of access.”
Bangladesh, host to the largest Rohingya refugee population in the world, is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. For Toyoub, that absence of legal status is not an abstraction; it shapes an ordinary Tuesday.
“If I am stopped by police outside the camp, I have no document that gives me a clear legal standing. There is no formal asylum process. It is a constant, low-level awareness of your own vulnerability that we carry everywhere It is exhausting in a way that is difficult to explain unless you have lived it.”
The 2017 exodus was, at the time, described by the United Nations as the fastest-developing refugee emergency in the world. Nine years on, funding for the Rohingya response has collapsed. Humanitarian programmes serving the camps were only about half funded in 2025 and remain badly underfunded this year. The World Food Programme (WFP) has repeatedly been forced to cut the monthly food vouchers on which nearly the entire camp population depends, at times halving assistance for a population of roughly 1.2 million people who are barred from working outside the camps and have almost no other source of income.
The WFP has documented the pattern in a series of public funding appeals, each one warning that rations are about to shrink again.
For Toyoub, the change isn’t about numbers, but about attention.
“The cameras left. That is the most visible change.”
He adds: “On the ground: the population has grown. Children who arrived as babies in 2017 are now nine years old and have never known anything outside the camp. The food rations have been cut more than once. International funding has reduced. Some NGO programmes have scaled back or left entirely. Movement restrictions have not loosened.”
Toyoub mentions that repatriation talks have gone in circles for years and that nothing safe or voluntary has materialised.
“The situation inside Myanmar has not resolved in any way that would make return realistic. What has changed is the world’s attention. In 2017 there was a crisis. In 2026, for most of the world, the Rohingya are a background fact. Something that happened. Something that continues, quietly, while other crises take the front page. Inside the camp, nothing is quiet. But from outside, it has become easy not to notice.”
“Clinics run short on medicine. Maternal health services become harder to access. People who need consistent medication for chronic conditions cannot always get it. Then the education programmes begin to change. Learning centres lose funding. Teachers who received small stipends stop receiving them and cannot continue.,” Touyob goes on about the challenges in the camp.
He mentions that the children who were attending school regularly have mostly dropped out, not because they stopped wanting to learn, but because the structure that made it possible has disappeared.
“The funding cuts look like everything becoming smaller. The margins get thinner. And the people already surviving on the thinnest margins are the first to fall through.”
Both of Bangladesh’s major political parties have periodically floated the idea of repatriating the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. Toyoub, who has never lived in Myanmar, is blunt about what that would mean.
“‘Going home’ to Myanmar would first require Myanmar to acknowledge that we are citizens, that we were always citizens, that the 1982 Citizenship Law that stripped us of our nationality was unjust, and that what was done to the Rohingya people was a crime. None of those conditions exist right now. So, when politicians talk about repatriation, I hear the voice of people who want a problem to go away, not people working to resolve it justly.”
That demand for acknowledgement is not only rhetorical; it now runs in parallel with an active international legal process. Myanmar is not a member of the ICC, but in November 2019, ICC judges authorised a full investigation into the situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar, because part of the alleged deportation and persecution of the Rohingya occurred on the territory of Bangladesh, an ICC member state. In November 2024, the court’s prosecutor filed an application for an arrest warrant against Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s armed forces, for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya committed in 2017. Separately, at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), hearings on the merits of The Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar began in January 2026.
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The court case is about what happened in Rakhine state in 2017. Toyoub’s life shows what it has cost to leave that particular incident unresolved for more than nine years: not in one dramatic event, but in a bribe to a school clerk, a missed scholarship deadline, a checkpoint on the road out of camp, a ration cut, a whole childhood spent inside a fence.
His sharpest words aren’t addressed to the Myanmar government; they’re reserved for the outside world, the way it has learned to see people like him.
“We are not a crisis. A crisis is a moment. The Rohingya are people who have been living in camps for decades, dreaming inside those camps, studying inside those camps, raising children inside those camps, doing human rights work from inside those camps. Please, do not see the Rohingya only as victims. See us as students, teachers, artists, parents, leaders, and dreamers. When you reduce us to a number in a funding report, you are doing a different version of the work those who tried to erase us, just using different tools.”
Asked what he wishes the world could see inside Kutupalong, he does not point to the tents.
“I wish they could see the students studying under solar lights, the volunteers teaching children, the young people dreaming of becoming doctors, teachers, engineers, and human rights advocates. Nobody is filming them, there is no audience. They study because it is the one thing that feels entirely their own.”
If the funding comes through and Toyoub reaches Winnipeg to start his studies in September, his plans are clear: mentorship programmes, scholarship pathways, leadership opportunities for the children he’s leaving behind in the camp, which he describes as being built by someone who “understand[s] this issue from the inside, not only from a policy paper”.
Asked what he wants to do on his first day in Canada, his answer is simple.
“Walk. Just walk outside, on a street, without calculating whether I am allowed to be there. Without checking if I need a pass. Without wondering what would happen if someone asked me for documents. Just walk like a regular person. … After that, I want to find somewhere quiet and call my mother. I want to tell her that I am there, that I am safe, and that everything she did to get me here has worked.”
Even after 35 years living in a refugee camp, Toyoub refuses to describe himself as a refugee.
“I am a dreamer who refuses to let borders, labels, or circumstances define how far I can go.”
Nine years after the world termed what happened to them a crisis, the Rohingya are still waiting for the same thing as Toyoub: the world to notice that it never ended.
