(soft music)
- [Narrator] About a thousand ethnic Rohingyas
call this slice of Southeast Portland home.
Many are survivors of genocide in Myanmar.
Mass atrocities that have been documented by global media.
- The world's fastest growing humanitarian crisis.
- Textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
- [Female Reporter] - Took us out from our home
and then slit my father's throat.
- [Male Reporter] Across the river,
there's a deliberate campaign of terror going on.
- [Narrator] From the killing fields to urban America,
these Rohingya do what they can to move on
but for survivors like Mohammad Noyeem,
everyday life is a reminder of the massacred dead.
(speaking in Rohingya)
- [Narrator] Inside homes, schools and strip malls,
Portland's Rohingya are taking small steps
to overcome their past lives,
lives completely devoid of basic human rights.
(speaking in Rohingya)
Iman Hussein was forced to leave behind everything
and everyone he knew over 8,000 miles away.
He, like other Rohingya, were prisoners in their own home,
a strip of land in northwest Myanmar called Rakhine State,
also known as Arakan.
The Rohingya have lived here for centuries
and faced ethnic and religious persecution since antiquity.
Inhabiting what is fundamentally a cultural fault line
where Muslim South Asia and Buddhist Southeast Asia
have historically collided.
The crisis accelerated in 1962 when an ultranationalist
military dictatorship took control of Myanmar.
This regime passed a law that took Rohingya off
Myanmar's list of recognized national ethnicities.
This made them a stateless people with no right
to vote, education or health care.
- [Male Reporter] Checkpoints mark
the entrance to Aung Mingalar.
This is Myanmar's version of apartheid.
- [Narrator] Despite restricted access to Rakhine state,
journalists and humanitarian workers have been able
to document the plight of the Rohingya.
Myanmar's security forces imposed restrictions
on travel, marriage and religious worship.
They conducted arbitrary arrests, brutal acts of violence,
and systematic mass killings, like in 2017.
At least 10,000 were killed and many more traumatized.
One witness to the aftermath of this carnage
was Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley.
He was the first member of U.S. Congress
to lead a delegation to Rakhine State
following the 2017 mass killings.
- People were shot from helicopters,
villages were torched, women were raped,
it was horrific, horrific genocide
and for America to be silent is completely unacceptable.
- [Narrator] As a result of the oppression
and the violence, over a million Rohingya
have fled to refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh
and tens of thousands to Southeast Asian countries
like Malaysia and Indonesia
but a small percentage of Rohingya refugees
have also been legally resettled in the U.S.
Which brings us back to the quiet drama
in places like Portland's Mingala market.
Iman Hussein arrived in Portland as a refugee
in early 2018, and within months he's working
at one of the oldest halal markets in town.
(speaking in Rohingya)
Yusuf Iqbal is Mingala's owner and the guy
responsible for Iman's job.
He's also Rohingya but his life circumstances
shaped a very different path to the U.S.
- I was born and raised in different part of Burma
so because of that, I am fortunate and my brother and sister
we got a chance to go to education as like other Burmese do.
- [Narrator] Yusuf obtained U.S. citizenship
through the Diversity Visa lottery.
Now a business owner, Yusuf's paying it forward
by showing the ropes to recently arrived refugees like Iman.
- He's very happy and he is quick learner.
In the beginning though it's very difficult.
He is illiterate, he doesn't know reads and writes.
The most difficult part of his training
was to use the scale.
It took him about a month.
- [Narrator] A lot of families frequent Mingala.
It's a hub for Southeast Portland's immigrant communities.
Iman wanted to show his family.
His wife Hamida, his two children Kayes Bibi
and Rusman Bibi, all still trapped in Rakhine State.
(speaking in Rohingya)
And that situation can feel omnipresent
because of the internet.
- [Male Reporter] - Countless rapes.
- [Male Reporter] This is what genocide looks like.
(speaking in Rohingya)
- [Narrator] This is genocide in the age of digital news
and social media, everything is online.
The hate speech and incitement to kill
to the harrowing mass exodus.
So though Portland's Rohingya are thousands of miles
away from the horror, they can't actually escape it.
- I spend my life with the computer.
My eyes and ears all are in Bangladesh refugee camps.
And also in Arakan, Burma.
- [Narrator] Mohammad's community suffered
from devastating attacks in 2016 and 2017.
Today, those massacres are a quick
google search away for him.
Just typing in his village name, Myo Thu Gyi
pulls up this one grisly article among many.
- All my village was already burned down
and everything they bulldozed, nothing left.
All done, nothing.
- [Narrator] So the trauma and then the re-trauma,
it's inescapable, but despite the pain,
Portland's Rohingya community
are figuring out collective ways of healing.
- I start feeling that I can speak English
and my people do not.
I can read and write and I can help them out
in a way that some other people couldn't do.
- [Narrator] Yusuf has organized a weekly gathering
at the local mosque to share prayers and to consult
on pressing information from back home.
- [Yusuf] Someone bring the fresh news, my uncle
got shot dead, my nephew was kidnapped,
I don't know what's happened.
- [Narrator] And Yusuf has taken community action
a step further.
Here he is at a 2018 Portland event.
- If you knew about Rohingya, raise your hand, very few.
- [Narrator] Along with Mohammed Husson Ali,
he founded Americans for Rohingya,
a non profit set up to raise awareness
of the Rohingya genocide and advocate for more action.
The U.S. slapped economic sanctions on Myanmar in 2018
but has avoided calling what's happening
in Rakhine State a genocide.
This makes prosecuting Myanmar's military leaders
very difficult and prevents safe repatriation
of Rohingya refugees.
Part of the issue is the region's geopolitics.
- Burma has a very strong relationship with China.
It would take a lot of American leadership
to bring China and other Southeast Asian countries
and others who trade with Burma to bring enough pressure
to create the space for repatriation.
So I'm sorry to say this but I think we're going
to have to look to the next administration
to show leadership.
- [Narrator] Meanwhile, Portland's Rohingya community
is desperate for resolutions.
(speaking in Rohingya)
Returning to Myanmar isn't an option for Rohingya
who've fled so the future of the Rohingya rests
with its young, living across a new global diaspora.
(speaking in Rohingya)
Noyeem's doing something, he never could have done at home.
Taking steps towards completing higher education.
He'd been beaten and imprisoned as a youth
and in 2015, after his parents managed to secure
a spot for him on a traffickers' boat,
he nearly drowned at sea en route to Indonesia
but Noyeem stayed alive, fulfilling the hopes of his family.
- Burma is an Asian country.
- [Narrator] A 2017 UN report found that Myanmar's military
singled out educated Rohingya in their violence
in an effort to kill Rohingya culture.
- G-Y-A.
Yeah that's my language, that's my primary language.
- [Narrator] But with enough people like Noyeem
pursuing education, that culture might just survive
for future generations.
(reciting Qur'anic verse)
- [Narrator] As it stands, the majority of the global
Rohingya population now live outside their homeland
and it's in places like this small mosque
in Southeast Portland where hope is taking hold
and the story of a long oppressed people
begins a new chapter.
(soft music)