In the Western media, nowadays at least, the word ‘Myanmar’ rarely appears far from the cosy little phrase ‘former military dictatorship’, and barely a day goes by but we aren’t privy to a picture of President Thein Sein, peace prize nomination in back pocket, glad-handing with Washington big-wigs and signing Chinese free-trade agreements with a flourish. It’s as if the ’88 revolution, the imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi and 60 years of military dictatorship were generally things which, for the incumbent Burmese leader, were unpleasant little hiccups which happened to other people.
Some of those unfortunate other people are the Rohingya. Members of Muslim minority resident in Myanmar for almost two centuries, the Rohingya are nonetheless denied Burmese statehood and are subject to a campaign of government-sanctioned hostility so intense it has been described by Human Rights Watch as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Accepted as citizens by neither Myanmar nor their originary homeland of Bangladesh, the Rohingya have become increasingly isolated in the desolated hinterland between the two countries, living day to day in refugee camps yet denied refugee status.
For seven years, US photojournalist Greg Constantine has travelled between the countless camps on the mountainous Burma-Bangladesh border, documenting the plight of the stateless Rohingya. And he’s coming to Phnom Penh soon to present a slideshow of selected photographs from his new book Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya.
Shot in bone white and black, Constantine’s photographs recount the stories of the tens of thousands who have fled to the border region to escape violence only to find themselves adrift and alone, corralled in no-man’s land. Myanmar’s forgotten minority, they are, as the book title suggests, exiles to nowhere.
Constantine returned to the Burma-Bangladesh border area eight times between 2006 and 2012, capturing life in various camps with an unswerving gaze. They are not easy to look at, these images. There are close-up portraits of grandfathers, confusion and distress cross-hatched into the grey skin on their temples. There are men more skin than bones staring resignedly, or children carrying heavy burdens. Mud is the over-riding landscape feature. Weirdly, as with much conflict photography, Constantine’s lens somehow renders the Rohingya’s misery uncannily beautiful.
Accusations of photo voyeurism or, worse, conflict pornography sometimes haunt photojournalists. The best shots are the most likely to raise eyebrows the highest: a Vietcong being executed at point-blank range, eyes screwed shut; a Somali stoning. There’s something taboo about looking at someone else’s suffering and then walking away. But Constantine raises the experience above that of mere viewer or voyeur by interspersing the images in his book with interviews with the Rohingya of the photographs, contextualising their experiences as exiled and abandoned people. His Meta House presentation will achieve the same effect through the photographer’s retelling of their stories and his own, giving a voice to Myanmar’s forgotten minority.
Exiled To Nowhere is part of Nowhere People, a larger project in which Constantine documents stateless peoples from countries around the world, including Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh and Ukraine.
WHO: Greg Constantine
WHAT: Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya slideshow and presentation
WHERE: Meta House, Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: To be confirmed (Watch This Space!)
WHY: The Rohingya may be exiled, but they’re not forgotten