In early 2025, Reuters reported that the United Nations had been forced to halve food rations for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh—down to about six dollars a month per person. The figure was staggering in its cruelty and quiet in its reception. A decade ago, such a revelation might have filled global headlines and humanitarian appeals. Now it passed almost unnoticed, lost among other crises competing for the world’s conscience.
The Guardian’s January 2025 coverage offered a human echo of that silence. A refugee from the camps near Cox’s Bazar said simply, “We’ve lost all hope.” His words summed up more than despair; they captured an entire crisis trapped between exhaustion and invisibility. Nearly one million Rohingya remain confined in limbo—denied citizenship in their homeland, denied future in exile. Yet, the attention that once surrounded their suffering has eroded into bureaucratic routine.
Reuters quoted UN officials warning that “funding shortfalls” now threaten lives. Donor fatigue, they said, stems from the perception that the Rohingya crisis is endless. The transformation is linguistic as much as moral. Where journalists once described “massacres” and “exodus,” today’s press releases speak of “protracted situations” and “resource challenges.” Each shift of vocabulary signals how the extraordinary has become ordinary.
Scholars like MJ Lee, in her 2021 paper Media Influence on Humanitarian Interventions, documented that spikes in coverage directly influence aid flows and international action. When the cameras depart, funding collapses. The Rohingya crisis exemplifies that decline. What began as one of the century’s most photographed atrocities has become an invisible endurance test.
Media Fatigue and the Politics of Forgetting
MS Al-Zaman’s 2024 study Global Media Sentiments on the Rohingya Crisis traced how global coverage diminished after 2018. Western outlets pivoted toward other wars—Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan—while regional media in South and Southeast Asia re-framed the Rohingya as a “security burden.” The data reflected what communication theorists call compassion fatigue: the dulling of empathy through repetition.
At the crisis’s peak, images of burning villages and terrified civilians flooded television screens. There was narrative clarity—victims, villains, and the moral urgency to act. But when violence persisted without resolution, audiences disengaged. The story lacked novelty; suffering repeated itself.
A 2023 SAGE analysis, Visual Themes and Frames of the Rohingya Crisis, observed that the same stock photographs reappear in NGO reports and news features. What once shocked has become generic. In a media economy driven by novelty and competition for clicks, sameness kills concern.
The political landscape reinforced this forgetfulness. Bangladesh hardened its policies, restricting movement and cutting education programs. ASEAN, wary of confrontation, continued to treat Myanmar’s junta as a dialogue partner. Diplomatic communiqués began to label the genocide as “repatriation logistics.” Language sanitized horror; bureaucracy absorbed outrage.
The result is not accidental neglect—it is structural forgetting. Institutions, media systems, and governments all benefit from reducing a moral emergency into a manageable file. The Rohingya no longer occupy the space of the shocking; they exist in the dull zone of humanitarian maintenance.
Humanitarian Paralysis and the Bureaucratization of Suffering
The 2025 Springer article by MR Howlader describes the Rohingya camps as “laboratories of humanitarian governance.” Every ration, every registration, every movement is mediated through administrative control. Relief once meant survival; now it ensures containment. UN officials admit that their programs “sustain life but not dignity.”
Reuters’ March 2025 reporting echoed that admission: humanitarian agencies were “maintaining stability, not progress.” The ration card has replaced the passport; data points replace identities. This is what scholars term the bureaucratization of suffering—a process by which misery becomes paperwork.
The media’s silence compounds the effect. Crises that cannot deliver resolution stories fade from headlines. Ukraine offers daily updates, Gaza unfolds in real-time feeds, but Cox’s Bazar stagnates in repetition. Editors perceive little narrative movement, so coverage recedes.
The Guardian’s 2025 report noted renewed pushbacks at the Myanmar border, with some returnees detained by the Arakan Army. Without sustained visibility, these abuses exist only as footnotes in NGO reports. Invisibility does not neutralize violence; it amplifies impunity.
Local and Regional Framing: Between Hostility and Fatigue
Islam and Hasan’s 2021 research The Rohingya Refugee in the Bangladeshi Press showed how domestic narratives shifted from sympathy to suspicion within just three years of the 2017 exodus. Early coverage emphasized humanitarian urgency. By 2020, terms like “security,” “environmental damage,” and “economic burden” dominated headlines.
This change paralleled state rhetoric. As public resentment grew, policymakers stressed national strain and international inaction. Media alignment followed naturally. When governments define a population as a problem, journalism often echoes that framing—sometimes unconsciously.
Across Southeast Asia, Al-Zaman’s analysis found a similar caution. ASEAN-linked media avoided naming perpetrators, favoring the neutral phrase “ethnic tension.” Such linguistic hedging maintains diplomatic comfort while erasing accountability.
In this context, the Rohingya story has turned into what one scholar calls geopolitical wallpaper—always present, rarely noticed. Its constancy breeds indifference. Governments, donors, and audiences all benefit from the illusion of normalcy. Stability masquerades as success.
The Ethics of Attention
The question, then, is not simply why global sympathy fades but what moral vacuum it leaves behind. When the world stops watching, perpetrators breathe easier. MJ Lee’s research linked declines in media coverage to reduced prosecutorial momentum in international courts. The Rohingya genocide case at the International Court of Justice now crawls through procedural delays, far from the moral urgency that once surrounded it.
The Guardian’s January 2025 feature closed with that haunting line: “We’ve lost all hope.” Hope is inseparable from recognition. To be unseen is to be abandoned twice—first by violence, then by the indifference of witnesses.
Susan Sontag, writing decades earlier, warned that endless exposure to atrocity images dulls the moral sense instead of deepening it. Moeller later expanded that idea into “compassion fatigue,” showing how modern audiences, overwhelmed by crises, disengage for self-protection. The Rohingya crisis is their theory realized: empathy stretched until it snaps.
What remains is the ethical challenge of designing systems that do not depend on outrage cycles. If conscience relies on virality, justice dies when the feed refreshes. Mechanisms of accountability must outlast emotion—through sustained funding, independent documentation, and legal persistence.
A Crisis Remembered Only by Its Victims
The current phase of the Rohingya tragedy is defined not by mass killings but by managed invisibility. Reuters’ and Guardian reports make clear that deprivation now occurs quietly: aid cuts, border closures, children growing up stateless. The violence has slowed, but injustice has not.
In the absence of global engagement, the burden of remembrance falls on the refugees themselves. Community journalists in the camps, often using donated phones and solar chargers, continue documenting abuses. Their testimonies, shared through small outlets like Rohingya Khobor and regional human-rights groups, are fragments of memory resisting erasure.
Academically, the crisis has become a case study in humanitarian fatigue. Yet for those living inside barbed-wire fences, it is not fatigue but endurance. The political vocabulary—“resettlement,” “repatriation,” “integration”—conceals the truth: none of these processes exist in reality.
The media’s retreat allows that illusion to stand. Each unreported death, each aid reduction, each diplomatic delay extends the lifespan of injustice. Attention may not guarantee change, but its absence ensures continuity.
Conclusion: The Silence That Enables Impunity
The Rohingya once symbolized the world’s moral clarity: a persecuted minority fleeing genocide, a test of international conscience. Today they symbolize its exhaustion. The same nations that once condemned Myanmar’s generals now negotiate with them. The same outlets that once published front-page exposés now assign brief summaries to interns.
From Reuters’ meticulous reporting on ration cuts to The Guardian’s human stories, the evidence is unambiguous. The crisis persists; only outrage has vanished. Academic studies—from Lee’s work on media-humanitarian dynamics to Al-Zaman’s analysis of global coverage—confirm a single pattern: empathy is a resource as finite as funding.
To speak of the Rohingya today is to resist that depletion. Their suffering is not a historical episode; it is a continuing indictment of selective sympathy. If moral attention remains a luxury reserved for the new and the dramatic, then humanity has already failed its own test.
Silence, in the end, is not neutrality. It is permission.
References
- Reuters (March 5 2025). UN to slash rations to Rohingya refugees by half to $6 per month.
- Reuters (March 24 2025). Rohingya in Bangladesh face dire consequences if aid money drops, say UN agencies.
- The Guardian (January 22 2025). “We’ve lost all hope”: Rohingya trapped as Bangladesh closes Myanmar border.
- MJ Lee (2021). Media Influence on Humanitarian Interventions: Analysis of the Rohingya Refugee Crisis. SpringerOpen.
- MS Al-Zaman (2024). Global Media Sentiments on the Rohingya Crisis. MDPI.
- Visual Themes and Frames of the Rohingya Crisis (2023). SAGE Journals.
- MR Howlader (2025). The Rohingya Crisis in Bangladesh: Challenges and Responses. Springer.
- Islam & Hasan (2021). The Rohingya Refugee in the Bangladeshi Press. ResearchGate.
