Šagolj: How We Won the Pulitzer – The Unfortunate Rohingya Like Bosnians Back Then and Palestinians Forever

As part of the Reuters photography team, Damir Šagolj is a Pulitzer Prize winner for photography. He wrote for Media.ba about one of the four awarded photographs, which recently won first prize at the Istanbul Photo Awards.

Damir Šagolj / Media.ba

I took the photograph of Abdul Aziz, his eyes covered with two green leaves and forever closed, in a refugee camp in Bangladesh more than five years after the first images of the suffering of the Rohingya people seared my camera. In the meantime, what had been smoldering for decades metastasized into an extensive and ruthless ethnic cleansing campaign directed against this Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, or Burma, as we used to call that beautiful country.

If I were to try to describe the indescribable scale and depth of the darkness that, with the almost silent consent of the wider social community and each of us individually, has descended upon the unfortunate Rohingya, perhaps it would be appropriate to say – a fate like the Bosniaks back then and the Palestinians forever, only a hundred times worse and three hundred times more brutal.

Unfortunate and unloved, tormented and suffering, unrecognized and nobody's, the Rohingya have for decades, with minds and bones stretched across graves on both sides of the border and reason, been appearing in newspaper columns and television minutes reserved for news from areas we know nothing about, nor are we particularly interested.

Only in the second half of 2017, when the intensity of the atrocities and the number of people against whom they were committed became so great that even a world saturated with scenes of mass horror could no longer ignore it, did we begin to ask ourselves en masse whether it is pronounced Rohingya or Rohinja, who they are and what they are, and how it is that the lady with the flower in her hair and the Nobel Peace Prize is not standing up in their defense.

The terrible images and stories of the unfortunate fate of the Rohingya finally made it to the front pages and began to threaten our consciences, buried deep in the trenches of indifference, and the usual hordes of journalists and humanitarian workers began to sharpen their cameras, pack their tents, and head in the direction from which everyone else was fleeing.

I, as is my job, became well acquainted with the fate of these unfortunate people while I was still living in Thailand and reporting from Southeast Asia. In perhaps the most horrific scene of my career, rich with all sorts of horrors, in a Rohingya refugee camp outside the city of Sittwe, from which they were expelled, a boy of about 16 was dying on a tin bed, with a piece of wood between his teeth and in terrible delirium. A rabid dog had bitten him on the leg, nothing unusual for that part of the world, but there was no salvation for Vaduleu. On the wrong side of the wire fence behind which unfortunate people of the wrong name and faith were crammed, there were no doctors or medicine. In what should have been a clinic, a single gentleman, a former employee of the Ministry of Health with no medical knowledge or experience, was trying to help even those who could not be helped.

Helpless, ashamed, and endlessly angry, all I could do was take pictures, hoping it all had some meaning. The difficult scene of the boy's death, for whom salvation was within reach before it was too late, and that almost unbearable photograph for me, opened up one of the stories for which Reuters received the first in a series of major awards that year for reporting on this terrible story. More people will see these images and learn about this tragedy, I console myself in the usual whirlwind of emotions after being recognized for reporting on someone else's misfortune.

Five years and thousands of terrible photographs later, in the dust of a newly erected refugee camp near Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of newly displaced people had gathered, the same feeling returned. Abdul Aziz's mother, another angel paying for our sins, could not hold back tears and anger as she tried to explain the inexplicable to me.

The boy, whose family had survived ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and the dangerous journey to misery but also relative safety of refugee life in Bangladesh, was completely healthy until a few weeks ago, and then a fever began to shake him. The doctors in the tent clinic, from which his crying mother returned him, motionless and wrapped in a blanket, could not help him. What exactly broke his fragile and emaciated body, whether it was pneumonia or something worse, no longer matters. He was killed by terrible injustice, unpunished crime of the stronger, and the silence of the uninterested.

All I can and know how to do is photograph another dead child with two green leaves over his forever closed eyes.