Between Dhaka and the Nasaka

Under the tormenting sun in Teknaf, on the southeastern tip of Bangladesh, Ahmed puts us straight: it is really all about love. His wife stands next to him in his tarpaulined shop in the unofficial Kutupalong refugee camp in southern Bangladesh. He came here, Ahmed says, to marry his childhood sweetheart, fleeing what Physicians for Human Rights, a watchdog group, describes as 'flagrant and widespread human rights abuses' that condemned Ahmed to having to pay an exorbitant bribe just to marry. Today, his 18-month-old baby crawls over small packets of paan and snacks on sale, mimicking his father's voice unknowingly, describing the indescribable – how Rohingya women were told by the Burmese military that, in order to marry, they would have to have an implant rendering them infertile.

The Dhaka government has long been aware of the ethnic tensions in the Rohingya's native Arakan state on western Burma. Indeed, by all accounts, the junta has actively fostered this situation over the years; for decades, the Rohingya community – Muslims in a Buddhist-dominated country – has been denied even the most basic of citizenship rights. But in the run-up to Burma's national elections last November, evidently in the hopes of garnering votes, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) promised the Rohingya the citizenship rights they crave.