Enayet Khan fled Myanmar in 2017. For three days, he moved through forests and fields with his family, slipping from one village to the next as fires closed in behind them. Each time they stopped, the safety was temporary — by morning, that village too would be burning. His own home had already been reduced to ash, but there was no time to mourn what was lost. Armed soldiers moved quickly, and Khan saw people being shot in front of him. The goal was simple : to survive long enough to find a way out of Myanmar. Ten members of his family fled together; three were injured along the way. Eventually, they crossed the border into Bangladesh.
“I lost everything,” Khan told Hyperallergic in a phone call. “Home, documentation, property, a sense of security.”
Khan settled in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, now home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees. The Rohingya people have endured decades of discrimination and repression under Myanmar’s successive governments. Stripped of citizenship by a 1982 law, they remain one of the largest stateless groups in the world. Most fled in 2017 to escape the military’s crimes against humanity and genocide.
In the camps, Khan turned to painting and drawing to process the atrocities he had witnessed: burning homes, fleeing families, and executions. Over time, he began training other refugees to do the same, establishing the Rohingya Art Club (RAC) and encouraging visual storytelling as a form of expression and resistance.
Khan is one of many refugees using art to record experiences of conflict and violence. According to legal experts, such work can also play a role in accountability efforts, helping to convey testimony and corroborate survivor accounts, and even enter legal proceedings as evidence of mass atrocities.
A record 117.8 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide — a number that has risen for 12 consecutive years. Investigations and prosecutions of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes have surged within the European Union, with new cases increasing by 44% between 2016 and 2021. Today, more displaced people are turning to international courts to hold perpetrators accountable, an increase in demand that the International Criminal Court (ICC) itself has called “unprecedented.”
For some legal advocates, art has become one way to meet that demand.
Antonia Mulvey, executive director of Legal Action Worldwide and a former United Nations investigator, collected artwork as part of the evidence in a case before the International Court of Justice that charged the Myanmar military with genocide against Rohingya communities in 2017. She noted that the high illiteracy rate among Rohingya people, especially women and children, makes it difficult to record traditional statements. In those contexts, drawings became a vital way to convey their testimonies.