Edibe Beyza CaglarOn an August night in 2017, fourteen-year-old Lucky Karim woke to the sound of gunfire. The shots were so close that she could feel them in her chest.
In her village, Maungdow, in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, people had learned to read violence by its sounds. Sometimes it came in brief spurts, but this was different.
“There was non-stop gunfire around us, and they (military) started burning our homes three days before we left,” Karim tells TRT World over a Zoom call from Chicago.
Myanmar’s military, backed by Buddhist mobs, had launched a brutal campaign in Rakhine State, killing thousands of indigenous Rohingya civilians, burning entire villages, and forcing more than 700,000 to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh, and make perilous journeys to Indonesia and Malaysia.
The United Nations would later call the 2017 assault a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Rights groups had a blunter word: genocide.
Recalling the night she and her family fled their home back on August 25 in 2017, Lucky’s family thought they might hide in the forest for a few days, as they had before, and then return.
“We thought people were just going to hide somewhere around and we’d get back to our homes after a day or two,” she says. “Because this is what we’ve experienced so many times in our lives in Rakhine State.”
Instead, they walked, seven days through rain, following a group of slow-moving villagers toward the Bangladesh border.
Progress was painfully slow, as only one person could cross the border at a time. They had to wait until 3 in the morning, when soldiers and officials were asleep, to slip through quietly.
“It took us almost three months to settle down and find our own shelter, and then be able to receive food rations from the World Food Programme,” she says.
And when they crossed the border, the only thing that was waiting for them was uncertainty and a vacant area with no shelter or any livelihood.
Lucky was placed in a sprawling refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh. It is now the largest camp in the world, housing more than a million Rohingya.
She is among over one million Rohingya who have been persecuted for being Muslim and a minority in Myanmar. Since 1983, Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country, has stripped Rohingya Muslims of their citizenship, making them the largest stateless population in the world.
As the genocide against Rohingya Muslims marks its eighth year, the population continues to rely entirely on humanitarian aid for protection, food, water, shelter, and healthcare.
With little to no coverage, Myanmar’s brutal campaign against Rohingya Muslims reached its peak in August 2024, according to the United States Institute of Peace, making voices like Lucky’s more vital than ever.
For nearly six years, Lucky lived there, refusing to let displacement define her.
Camps to congress
For Lucky, the goal was clear: to help her community by breaking the barriers of refuge and making her voice heard.
She learned English from aid workers, volunteered with humanitarian groups, and became an interpreter for the UN.
“I realised language was one of the powerful tools for me to use, communicate the needs of my people to policymakers, UN agencies, the local authority, and translate and interpret the languages to a foreigner, or to a local authority,” she says.
By seventeen, she was among the first Rohingya women in the camps fluent enough to speak directly to diplomats and journalists. She enrolled at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong.
Three years later, she was on a plane to Chicago, and she had a goal and a vision.
“For me, returning to the refugee camp was one of my top priorities because I always believed in the community's perspective, their opinions matter to me, to shape my advocacy language, and carry their messages to the right places, the right people at the right time,” she says.
Her first months in America were a blur.
In 2023, she wrote a moving op-ed in which she described how the six years without access to schooling have created a lost generation of Rohingya youth.
She wrote of girls who were forced into marriage at a young age, and with little education or means to earn an income, they lacked the independence to shape their own lives. That had left them more vulnerable to domestic violence and abuse, something, she wrote, she had seen happen to those closest to her.
In 2023, she also testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Congress. She gained US permanent residency with her relatives, facilitated by UNHCR.
“Since then, I’ve been to almost every capital of the UN and government where the discussions on Rohingya and Burma have been taking place,” she adds. “My voice has been something unique because these people… did not meet somebody who was coming from the ground, from the camp.”
In 2024, she founded Refugee Women for Peace and Justice (RWPJ), the first registered Rohingya refugee-led organisation working directly with her community in Bangladesh.
This March, now 22, she became the first resettled Rohingya to return to Cox’s Bazar as part of the diaspora and as a human rights advocate.
It was both emotional and exciting for me to return back after just two years of my arrival in the US, she adds.
For Lucky, the shift from being labelled a refugee to being recognised as a permanent resident was profound. “It makes you feel like you’re one of the human beings,” she says. “You belong to the community. You belong to the world.”
