There is no end in sight for the Rohingya's struggle to amend their stateless status

Meenah can't remember her precise birthplace in Myanmar's Rakhine state. Based on descriptions she's heard of the place, she imagines it was a peaceful village surrounded by fields and greenery.

But that picture hardly reflects the state of affairs in Rakhine in recent weeks, with hundreds of deaths and 370,000 stateless Rohingya refugees fleeing into Bangladesh recorded from Aug 25 to Sept 12, according to UNHCR estimates.

When she was four months old, Meenah was taken by her mother alongside three of her siblings on a boat leaving the Bay of Bengal for Malaysia. The trip was organised by a broker who promised that they would be able to build new lives abroad.

It was 1983, one year after General Ne Win's government enacted a law that failed to recognise Rohingya as one of Burma's national races. As a result, the Rohingya were denied Burmese citizenship.

At that point, Burma had endured several decades of political turmoil under junta governments. A series of student protests had been held against the regime's violence and economic failure.

In the junta's crackdown on dissidents, army officials arrested Meenah's father, accusing him of organising the student protests. His whereabouts have been unverified since then.

Her mother was devastated by the disappearance of her husband. With Rohingya discrimination on the rise, she decided to take her children away from Rakhine state.

"[My mother] told me what happened at the time," Meenah, now 34, recalled. "It sounded just like the turmoil in present-day Rakhine. Houses were burned. People were killed and hurt."

But the promise of starting a new chapter in a foreign land withered upon arrival. Instead of arriving in Malaysia, the boat taking Meenah's family pulled up to the shores of Thailand. There, they were sold to a criminal gang who forced them to beg on the streets of Bangkok.

Meenah's mother was forced to take her daughter along with her to work for the gang. Meanwhile, Meenah's elder sister, Fatimah, four years old at the time, begged on a different street. At night, they ate and slept under the supervision of the gang.

In 1991, the police raided the house and arrested the gang. Meenah's family were freed but they still couldn't return to Myanmar.

The military junta launched a systematic crackdown on the Rohingya the same year that Meenah was freed, forcing 250,000 refugees to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.

The renewed violence followed the peak of the pro-democracy student protests, known as the 8888 uprising. The junta proceeded to impose martial law that let its officials conduct raids and arrest people -- in many cases without solid proof of any wrongdoing.

With no home to return to, Meenah's family have stayed on in Thailand since then as undocumented people, meaning they have no guarantee of any basic rights. They earn a meagre living from selling cheap commodities like roses and chewing gum.

"We are the lost causes of the war," said Meenah. "No one wants to flee home if it's a peaceful place. But when a house is in flames, you need to find water somewhere else."

Meenah's mother and two siblings have since passed away, but the war continues to have an effect over the third generation of the migrant family.

Meenah's two children, now enrolled in primary school, were born in Thailand but have yet to gain Thai citizenship. The same is the case for the children of Fatimah, 40. One of her children, aged 20, was rejected by employers due to his stateless status.

Other Rohingya from her old community have suffered a similar fate -- living in the shadows of public life, shut out of the motherland.

As the Rohingya refugee count continues to rise, it seems like future generations will continue to be cycled into states of despair.

NO CHOICE

A bout of violence broke out on Aug 25 after the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rakhine state insurgent group, launched an attack at police border posts, according to a report by the Myanmar government.

Security officials retaliated with a brutal attack. Soldiers reportedly started firing indiscriminately at unarmed Rohingya, including women and children, while destroying homes and executing arson attacks.

The ARSA first emerged in October 2016 when members of the insurgent group claimed responsibility for an attack on Myanmar border posts that left nine border officers and four soldiers dead.

Since then, the army has declared war against "Bengali extremist terrorism", a term strategically deployed to cast the Rohingya as not a native ethnic group but as outsiders. "Terrorism" further erases the reasoning behind the insurgency.

In Rakhine state, the townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung have been repeatedly raided by the Myanmar army, intent on suppressing the insurgency.

The media have reported several accounts of rape, torture and murder of innocent Rohingya in the state.

The international community has urged Myanmar's de facto leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to end the crackdown and exercise a peaceful approach to resolution.

Several signs indicate that the end of the conflict does not seem likely to be soon, nor does the prospect of Rohingya getting official citizenship. For example, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the current commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces, continued to use the term "Bengalis" instead of "Rohingya" during the fifth Thai-Myanmar High-Level Committee meeting in Khon Kaen, Thailand, last month.

Alongside the rising number of casualties, concern for the influx of refugees is growing in Myanmar's neighbouring countries.

The Bangladesh government proposed a controversial plan to move refugees away from the Bangladesh-Myanmar border to a remote, uninhabited island if the international community promises to provide the funds for the needed facilities.

"Bangladesh doesn't have the means to provide for refugees," said one Bangladesh diplomatic source.

"It's unfair that Bangladesh has to bear the task of resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees. But we are a humane country. Now we have an open border because we have no choice."

Since 1978, Rohingya refugees have crossed the border into Bangladesh seeking safety. The Bangladeshi government has set up refugee camps and repatriated those who have volunteered themselves.

Between 200,000 and 300,000 refugees arrived in 1991 and 2012 respectively, dates coinciding with government crackdowns. The most recent clashes seem likely to break the record for the largest influx of Rohingya refugees.

In the refugee-receiving countries, some are concerned about their personal security after seeing such mass mobilisations of refugees into their home territory.

On Sept 7, Bangladesh reported that soldiers from Myanmar had begun planting landmines along the shared border, the route used often for those returning to to Myanmar. The move means that Rohingya refugees will be at heightened risk when they cross the border back home, even if the violent conflict eventually subsides.

Fears of refugees have escalated in Thailand since the 2012 crackdown in Rakhine state. The renewed violence forced thousands of Rohingya to board overcrowded boats to Malaysia or even further south. But some boats ended up in Thailand instead.

In 2015, it grew apparent that human traffickers had played a significant role in facilitating mass refugee arrivals, exploiting their desperate need for a new home.

In May 2015, a joint military-police taskforce discovered over 30 bodies at an abandoned human trafficking camp in Sadao district, Songkhla, near the Thai-Malaysian border.

The camp had been used by traffickers to detain refugees who were expected to make a ransom payment before being smuggled back into Malaysia.

The discovery of the camp sharply undermined any Thai government claims that the US State Department's downgrading of Thailand on their Trafficking in Persons Report from 2014 to a Tier 3 country, the lowest rank indicating a failure to combat human trafficking, was to be doubted.

The incident led to the trials of over 100 people facing human trafficking charges. Among them were government officials and the former Thai general Manas Kongpan, who was dealt a sentence of 27 years in jail.

Many refugees remain detained in different authorities' facilities.

"Many [Rohingya refugees] are still in detention after the verdicts were given to traffickers," says Surapong Kongchantuk, a human rights lawyer who provides legal assistance to ethnic minorities.

"This shows that the Thai government hasn't taken any clear measures to solve their [stateless] status."

These Rohingya are likely to stay in detention for years to come, many of whom arrived in Thailand before 2015 and were charged with illegal entry to the country.

When the Thai government began looking into building facilities for them, residents protested. Some insisted that Thailand "should not intervene in Myanmar's affairs".

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

The worst might be yet to come for Meenah and her family, with the Thai government's new migrant labour law putting them in a tough spot.

The law introduces harsher penalties, from imprisonment to heavy fines, for undocumented migrants, as well as fines for employers who hire illegal migrants. The law has triggered a mass migrant exodus after coming into effect in June.

This led the government to declare a six-month indulgence period to give migrant workers time to process their identity documents in their country of origin. They could then use these documents to apply for legal status and work permits in Thailand.

But this procedure doesn't work in the case of undocumented Rohingya workers -- unrecognised as citizens in their native Myanmar, they could not go back home.

Fatimah has requested that Myanmar offices send documents for a key step in the identification procedure -- the nationality verification application -- but was rejected as she is not considered a Myanmar citizen.

Saddled with fear of facing the penalties, some landlords have urged their Rohingya tenants to leave their rented homes before the end of the indulgence period.

Fatimah's family have been given a deadline to leave before the end of the month.

"I can't track down my relatives in Rakhine states," she said. "With the conflict escalating recently, it's impossible to request the help of Burmese officials.

"As I was taken to Thailand in early childhood, I can't communicate in Burmese, which has made it even harder for me to be accepted by the Myanmar government."

Fatimah's future seems increasingly bleak, with limited options for legal recognition.

Rohingya who arrived in Thailand 30 years ago have "ethnic status", meaning they can stay in Thailand temporarily, although they have no official citizenship or legal status. Their children can apply for Thai citizenship, but they are not always granted it.

Some suspect that they are rejected due to discrimination.

In the early 2000s, the Thai government opened calls to let Rohingya apply for stateless status, meaning they could stay in Thailand while awaiting completion of their nationality verification process. However, the call for applications was only open for a limited time frame. Refugees who arrived after 2012 have since struggled to obtain status.

Spectrum contacted the Myanmar embassy to ask about cases of Rohingya being denied nationality verification. However, they did not reply by publication date.

A Rohingya whose family escaped Myanmar, Kasim, 33, describes the life of a refugee outside the motherland well.

"Any migrants, when having problems, can go to their respective embassy," he said. "When they leave, they have a home to return to. If they want to come back, they can come with a government memorandum of understanding for recruiting migrant workers. But Rohingya have none of this. They are left in the middle of nowhere. We have such an unlikely chance of getting help."

Last month, during Eid al-Adha, the Muslim sacrifice feast holiday, Kasim and friends gathered to donate meat to Rohingya community members in a Bangkok suburb.

It's a special time of year for Muslims to make merit and mingle with family members. Kasim can only convey his sympathy from afar for the conflict still raging at home.

His father, from Maungdaw township, saw much of this violence first hand.

Several of Kasim's friends, children of Rohingya migrants, still have no legal status. Some remain connected with relatives in Rakhine state, conversing on online video calls.

Another Rohingya community member shows off a photo of his mother still in the conflict zone, too old to flee on foot.

"Sometimes I don't want to be called a Rohingya," a young Rohingya woman told me during the feast. "Because people with this ethnic name are treated badly.

"But I am a Rohingya. I can't change the fact of this."

weighed down: A Rohingya refugee pulls a child as they walk to the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh. Photos: REUTERS

community spirit: At Eid al-Adha, the Muslim sacrifice feast, last month, Rohingya descendants gathered to donate meat in a Bangkok suburb, below. Photo: Paritta Wangkiat

taking a stand: Kashmiri students gather at a protest in Srinagar, India, against the killings of Rohingya in Myanmar. Hundreds of Rohingya deaths were recorded between Aug 25 and Tuesday. Photo: REUTERS

harm's way: Rohingya patients are treated at the District Sadar Hospital in Bangladesh. Attacks on Rohingya villages in Rakhine by security forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists have escalated lately. Photos: REUTERS

bone to pick: A bullet shown in the X-ray of a Rohingya at a Bangladesh hospital. Authorities blame insurgents for the violence in Rakhine.

grave news: Rescue workers and forensic officials dig out a skeleton found at an abandoned jungle camp in the Sadao district of Songkhla.

losing faith: Sayid Alam, president of the Rohingya Association Thailand, at a mosque in Bang Kapi. Many Rohingya leave on boats from Myanmar thinking they are Malaysia bound, but end up in Thailand. Photo: Paritta Wangkiat