THE USUAL BASE FOR INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISTS covering the Rohingya crisis is a hotel by the beach in Cox’s Bazar, a Bangladeshi resort town some sixty kilometres north of the vast refugee camps at Kutupalong and Balukhali. Every morning, they pile into SUVs, vans or pickup trucks, and join the stream of traffic taking aid workers, human-rights experts, and other out-of-towners southwards. The typical media team bound for the camps includes a driver, a reporter, a photographer, sometimes a cameraman or two, and, almost always, a local journalist as an assistant. The local journalists—“fixers” in the lingo of the international media—are typically possessed of multiple talents. Conversant in English, Bangla, and, preferably, the Rohingya language as well, they serve as translators and guides, manage logistics and dispense security advice. They must be savvy and well-networked enough to arrange any required permissions, to identify relevant sources, to persuade refugees to trust complete strangers with the details of their present and past. Beyond that, they must be bridges across cultural divides—able to decipher and explain clashing manners and contexts, to know just which words to use, and which never to utter, when translating questions and answers. These are the unsung heroes of international journalism, essential to the work of foreign correspondents, but too often not credited and badly paid.

I first visited Cox’s Bazar and started speaking with local journalists while reporting for The Hindu in mid-2018. At the time, it had been less than a year since August 2017, when targeted looting, killing, and rape by military and militia forces in nearby Myanmar sparked a mass exodus of Rohingya that filled the camps to overflowing. Global interest in the Rohingya was still at a peak, helped by a flood of reporting from the camps on their expulsion and escape, and on their new predicament as refugees. When I returned late that year, and again in August 2019 to report for a host of international publications, the world’s interest was somewhat waning, though the international media continued to report from the camps in a regular-stream. Between trips, and from the very start of the exodus, I followed the coverage closely as the Rohingya crisis became one of the most widely reported humanitarian stories of the last decade. Already on my first trip, amid the expansive reporting up to that point, it was hard to miss a recurring fixation on one theme in particular.

In 2018, I asked three established local journalists in Cox’s Bazar about the kinds of stories they were most often approached to work on. Between them, the three had worked with over a hundred media organisations and freelance journalists since the Rohingya exodus began. All three of them, separately, took less than a second to give me the same answer: stories on sexual violence.

One local journalist counted on his fingers the specific types of refugees he was most often asked to find: survivors of rape, of gang rape, of other sexual violence, survivors driven into sex work or trafficked into sex slavery, women who live with domestic violence.

A second local journalist recalled translating an interview with a survivor of gang rape for a German reporter who insisted on knowing whether the survivor had been held down by five men or seven. The local journalist told me that when she suggested the question might be inappropriate, the German reporter “told me I was not a journalist, and my job was to simply translate.” The local journalist insisted that part of the job was to sensitise outsiders to the Rohingya community’s trauma and conservative Muslim social code, and to flag improper queries. She never worked with the German reporter again.

On another occasion, when visiting a designated “child-friendly space,” a British journalist insisted that this local journalist ask a young girl if she had been raped. The girl’s mother was within earshot, and, the local journalist remembered, she “told me her daughter is too young for this inappropriate question.” The British journalist, unfazed, insisted that the local journalist translate another question: when was the girl going to get married? The mother, by then extremely upset, “asked me if I would ask the same question to children in my community. She said that they bring their children to the child-friendly space because this was a safe place, where children were supposed to be playing.” The local journalist recalled that the British journalist had asked to go to a child-friendly space “to be a fly-on-the-wall, and see what the community does inside these spaces. There was no mention of asking them about rape.”

A third local journalist remembered working with a male photojournalist who insisted that she ask a rape survivor with a bullet wound near her genitalia if he could photograph the injury. “I didn’t even have to ask her to refuse,” the local journalist told me. But the photojournalist insisted that she translate his question. “So I translated to the Rohingya woman that I was being made to ask this but she did not have to agree. If he had asked me that question, I would have reported him, taken action against him. But journalists think the Rohingya community, after having been through so much, have no feelings.”

Amid all the accounts of horror in the refugee camps, visiting journalists often screen survivors to find those with the “best-worst” stories—the ones with the most shocking details. One local journalist recounted taking a foreign journalist to meet with a group of women who had survived sexual violence. As the local journalist was translating one woman’s experience, the foreign journalist realised that the interviewee had experienced an attempted rape but managed to escape. The foreign journalist “stopped speaking to the woman mid-sentence, turned to me and said there was no penetration,” the local journalist said. “I had to find her someone else. Without explanation to the interviewee, she started speaking to another woman. It was as if the first woman’s experience was somehow wrong.”

This local journalist told me that her worst experience on the job was being made to ask a rape survivor why she had not aborted her baby. “As a woman, this is difficult for me to ask,” she said. “It is also downright insulting and, frankly, nobody’s business to ask this question.”

MOHAMMED ELEYAS AWOKE in the dark on the morning of 24 August 2017. It was around 3 am. He wondered why the neighbours were being so loud. His wife, heavily pregnant, worried that the noise would wake their ten-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. Eleyas stepped outside to see.

The neighbours’ house was on fire. Eleyas woke his old father and gathered his wife and children. They fled, carrying only some cash and their identity papers. For three days, they hid in a paddy field a short distance away and watched their village burn. “This had happened before,” Eleyas told me when we first met, in 2018. “We usually waited out the rampage and went back home. This time, they left nothing for us to go back to.”

The family set off on foot for Bangladesh. The walk, from Rathedaung Township in the north of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, took them two weeks. Eleyas’s wife gave birth to a baby girl on the way, aided by other fleeing women. With what little money he had, Eleyas paid one man making the same journey to carry his wife and another to carry his father, who had been wounded by a gunshot during the escape.

At least ten thousand Rohingya were killed in the 2017 violence, and around seven hundred and fifty thousand were forced over the border. Since then, the number of Rohingya in Bangladesh has swelled to over a million. The vast majority of them, including Eleyas and his family, are packed into the camps in Cox’s Bazar District.

Eleyas was a social worker back in Rakhine. In the camps, he found that he knew many of those who had also made it across from in and around Rathedaung. “In August, everyone was so busy surviving, no one was writing down what was being done to us,” he told me. “Everything I saw is etched in my brain. I started taking notes.”

Eleyas began to document atrocities, noting down details in a diary: dates, locations, and victims, of rapes, massacres, and maimings, alongside the contact details of survivors and witnesses. At the time, numerous lawyers and humanitarian groups were on the hunt for evidence of war crimes, to build a case before the International Criminal Court. Eleyas, who speaks English, became one of their first points of contact with the refugees. When Sheikh Hasina, the Bangladeshi prime minister, visited the camps in September 2017, she was presented with data built-in part on Eleyas’s work.

The lawyers and humanitarian groups, and also the Bangladesh government, soon set up their own systems for collecting evidence. They no longer relied as much on Eleyas, but he did not stop his work. His lists got longer, and the number of diaries grew. Inevitably, he found his long-term clientele.

Some weeks after he arrived, Eleyas helped a team from Al Jazeera speak with several survivors of the carnage. “Since then, many journalists call me and I help them find people in the camps,” he told me. “Our entire lives in Rakhine, we were not allowed to meet journalists. We met journalists for the first time in the camps. Journalists matter to us—they are our allies, and we want the world to know what happened to us.”

In the early days after the exodus, the international coverage coming out of the camps was essential to that goal, and to educating the world about the Rohingya people’s long history of mistreatment at the hands of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. The focus on sexual violence drove home the point that the systematic use of rape was a mainstay of the 2017 violence. But as the Rohingya story developed, the journalistic value of retelling the worst of the atrocities declined. As the refugees’ circumstances changed, the fixation on their past suffering often obscured their present needs.

“At this point, the particulars of sexual crime are irrelevant,” Nafeesa Shamsuddin, who was the head of communications for the Bangladesh-based humanitarian group BRAC in 2018, told me late that year. “There is evidence from UN reports that gang rapes happened. Do we need to see the photograph of a child being delivered to believe that?” If a Rohingya woman has said she was raped, Shamsuddin added, “we don’t need a photograph of a war baby during childbirth to believe she was raped.” There are other stories that needed telling—“about repatriation, refugee rights, education of the next generation of Rohingya children”—but those had not been given enough attention.

Journalists continue to seek Eleyas out, and he remains open to working with them. But even he has grown frustrated at the tendency to report only on the horrors catalogued in his diaries. “Where is the empathy in the people who claim to be here to tell our stories?” he said. “They use us to tell stories they have already made up their minds about.” The Rohingya had made it to Bangladesh, Eleyas added, “But do we have human rights? Why are our children not being educated? Even refugees have rights.”

in the run-up to May 2018—nine months after the violence that started the Rohingya exodus, and shortly before I first arrived in Cox’s Bazar—journalists and NGO workers in Cox’s Bazar received a flurry of requests to identify Rohingya women pregnant with babies conceived of rape, or “war babies,” as they are sometimes called. Nafeesa Shamsuddin told me that a Washington, DC-based photographer emailed her “to see if I could find her a Rohingya rape survivor who would agree to being photographed during the birth of the child.” Shamsuddin refused. A local journalist described how an American journalist asked to be pointed to any Rohingya woman pregnant from rape who had induced an abortion.

The media interest in war babies built up over several months before it peaked in mid-2018. One factor spurring it on was an estimate by Save the Children that forty-eight thousand babies were to be born in the camps that year. The number first appeared in a press release issued by the aid group that January, and from there it travelled far and fast. Within days, it was put out on the wires by the Associated Press, and had made headlines in the Daily Star, Bloomberg, The Guardian, the South China Morning Post, India Today and other outlets. It continued to appear well into the year. In May 2018, Agence France-Presse cited the figure in a report that appeared across the world—Singapore’s Straits Times, the Qatar Tribune and Yahoo News put it out under the headline, “Nine months on, the search for Rohingya babies born of rape.” The headline of a report in the Washington Post the same month stated, “Rohingya camps brace for wave of babies conceived in rape.” The report rounded the figure up to state, “50,000 babies are expected to be born in 2018, according to Save the Children.”

There is no question that there were Rohingya women in the camps who delivered babies conceived of rape, but how many there were, and whether there was any significant spike in births among the incoming Rohingya at all, has not been firmly established. A footnote to Save the Children’s press release showed that its estimate was calculated on the basis that approximately 4.9 percent of the Rohingya in Bangladesh were pregnant women. When I asked the organisation for the source of this base figure, I was pointed to a Needs and Population Monitoring Report for October 2017 released by the International Organisation for Migration, a part of the United Nations. But a November 2017 report by UNICEF put the proportion of pregnant women among the new arrivals far lower, at around three percent. The Save the Children press release quoted one of the organisation’s officers in Cox’s Bazar saying, “We’re expecting about 130 live births per day across 2018.” A UNICEF press release published in May 2018, just as the interest in war babies was peaking, stated that around sixty babies were being born in the camps each day—making for roughly twenty-two thousand births in 2018. A Time report that cited the sixty-a-day figure, published soon after the UNICEF press release appeared, said nothing about an imminent spike in births.