SEPTEMBER 30, 2025
NOT JUST A DATE ON THE CALENDAR
“An Open Reflection on the upcoming High-Level Conference on Rohingya, 30 September 2025”
from Ro Niyamot Ullah.
On 30 September 2025, a High-Level Conference on the Situation of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar will be held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Before I offer my appreciation to the organizers of this important event, I must first ask a deeply personal and painful question:
How many conferences have been held for the Rohingya since 2017?
And out of those gatherings with their long speeches, pledges, and political declarations what real impact have they had on our lives?
Did any of them bring us closer to our citizenship, justice, reparation, or even protection?
The answer if we dare to confront it honestly is devastating.
As a Rohingya genocide survivor, I cannot forget that our oppression did not begin in 2017. But it started long before with the systematic denial of our identity, our rights, and our very humanity since 1948, the year Myanmar became independent.
In the name of nationalism and purity, we were stripped of our citizenship, erased from official records, and turned into stateless people in our own ancestral land. Over the decades, we faced waves of violence, forced displacement, rape, torture, and mass killings, most recently culminating in the horrific 2017 military-led genocide that forced more than 700,000 Rohingya including myself to flee to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
But where did the world stand? When our villages burned, when our mothers were violated, when our fathers were shot, when our babies were thrown into fires–who stood with us?
For decades, we saw conference after conference, press release after press release, report after report. And yet, the perpetrators still walk free. Not only free but they are often supported politically, militarily, and economically by powerful nations that claim to champion human rights.
How can one claim to promote peace while supplying weapons to those committing genocide? How can one speak of justice while shaking hands with those who murder children?
We are not just survivors of genocide.
We are survivors of being forgotten.
We are survivors of a world that has profited from our pain, debated our humanity, and delayed our justice.
And I know perhaps this post will be ignored, skipped over, or silenced, especially by those who benefit from our wounds, from our statelessness, from our exiled breath.
Still, I must speak.
And now after this painful truth allow me to extend my sincere thanks to those organizing this unique and timely conference. I am deeply grateful that the international community is once again attempting to bring focus to the forgotten crisis of the Rohingya and other persecuted minorities in Myanmar. I truly hope and pray that this will not just be another symbolic event but a turning point toward real, lasting solutions.
We long for a future where the word “Rohingya” is no longer met with silence, rejection, or violence but with recognition, justice, and restored dignity.
We hope this conference will stand firm for our right to return to our homeland not as foreigners or illegal immigrants, but as citizens with full rights. Demand accountability and international justice for the military generals and others who orchestrated crimes against our people. Promote a clear path to citizenship, security, freedom of movement, and reparation for all the harm we endured.
We do not want to live the rest of our lives behind barbed wire fences in Cox’s Bazar the world’s largest refugee camp where we are denied education, healthcare, work, and freedom. We are not criminals, yet we are caged.
We are not invisible, yet we are ignored.
We are not voiceless, yet the world rarely listens.
We seek dignity, not pity.
We want to go home but only if that home welcomes us with our identity, citizenship, safety, and peace.
To all decision-makers, donors, diplomats, and delegates attending the 30 September 2025 conference:
Please let this be the moment when your words become actions,
When your pledges bring protection,
When your politics serve people,
And when the Rohingya people who have suffered silently for decades are finally heard, restored, and embraced as equal members of humanity.
Let this conference be not just a day on the calendar,
But a light in the darkness,
A signal of hope,
And a promise that this time, the world will not look away.
With hope and brokenness
But still standing.
Leave a Reply