This little Rohingya girl is sitting in an unauthorized refugee camp at Kutupalong, Bangladesh. The photo was taken in 2012 during the violent siege of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar when fleeing refugees were pouring into Bangladesh & being turned back by border patrols. The images from that event are horrific & impossible to forget.

An unauthorized camp is where unregistered refugees live. The Bangladeshi government prevents most Rohingya from registering with the UNHCR which means they are not eligible for humanitarian aid &, of course, they have no rights in Bangladesh, including especially the right to work.

After reading about so much human suffering in the world, one can become inured or numbed as a psychological device against discouragement. But social transformation requires that we never take emotional distance from those sustaining genocide, war, plunder. If we understand that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” we will see them as our own. We must see them as our own because solidarity is the iron law of social transformation.

End the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. Open the borders to refugees.

(Photo by Saurabh Das/AP)