56 Asia The Economist October 9th 2021
RohingyasinBangladesh
Shadowed by
violence
D
eath threatsdid not appear to faze
Mohib Ullah. “If I die, I’m fine. I will
give my life,” he told reporters in 2019. A
science teacher in Myanmar before he and
hundreds of thousands of other Rohingya
refugees were forced to flee in 2017, the 46
yearold became one of the displaced com
munity’s most prominent voices on the in
ternational stage. He compiled databases
of Rohingyas killed in Myanmar, organised
huge rallies and spoke at the un. Yet his
fame and his resistance to violence also
earned him enemies. On September 29th
gunmen burst into his shack in the Kutu
palong refugee camp in southern Bangla
desh and shot him dead.
A persecuted ethnic minority in their
native Myanmar, some 700,000 Rohingyas
were chased from their homes by the Bur
mese army and allied militias four years
ago. Their accounts of rape, murder, and
mutilation shocked the world. Yet the vio
lence did not stop at the border. The
sprawling refugee camps in Bangladesh—
now home to more than 1m refugees—have
become bases for Rohingya militant
groups and criminal gangs. The most po
werful is the Arakan Rohingya Salvation
Army (arsa), a crossborder insurgency.
(Bangladeshi security forces deny that
there are any militants in the camps.)
Mr Mohib Ullah’s brother, who was with
him when he died, blamed arsafor the as
sassination. The insurgents opposed Mr
Mohib Ullah’s peaceful approach and tried
to coopt him, which he resisted. arsade
nied responsibility for his shooting, point
ing the finger instead at criminal gangs.
These gangs run drug and peopletraf
ficking rings and wage bloody feuds
against one another, terrorising the camps’
residents. Violent crimes take place “all the
time at night”, says a Rohingya woman.
These include robberies, assaults, hostage
takings and killings. So afraid is she to go
outside after dark, she says, that she uses a
corner of her tiny shelter as a toilet. Kid
nappings are common, too. One Rohingya
man tells of a friend who was abducted by
an armed group. They threatened to kill
him if his family did not pay 50,000 taka
(US$583), says the man.
Rohingya women have come under par
ticular attack, as men—often linked to
gangs or militias—try to impose conserva
tive gender norms. When Nur (not her real
name), a young Rohingya woman, won a
scholarship to university, men affiliated
A Rohingya leader’s murder highlights
W rising insecurity in refugee camps
hen“squidgame”appearedon
Netflix in midSeptember, many
South Korean reviewers were under
whelmed by the homegrown survival
drama. They found the characters cli
chéd, the plot unconvincing and the
violence gratuitous. The whole thing,
they complained, was too similar to
older films, such as the Japanese “Battle
Royale”, and added nothing new to the
survival genre, notwithstanding the
striking set designs and starstudded
cast. “Even though every genre has its
clichés, too much in ‘Squid Game’ re
minds you of every other movie you’ve
ever seen,” complained one critic.
“Squid Game”, which takes its name
from a common Korean schoolyard
game, follows a group of debtridden
losers, including an unemployed gam
bling addict, a North Korean refugee and
a Pakistani migrant worker. Dressed in
green tracksuits evoking those worn by
Korean pupils during school sports and
policed by shadowy supervisors in black
masks and hotpink jumpsuits, they
fight for a nearly $40m prize—and their
lives—in violent versions of traditional
Korean children’s games. Rich spectators
in embroidered robes watch from a vip
lounge filled with exotic plants and
crystal chandeliers. Hwang Donghyuk,
the director, says the show is an allegory
about modern capitalism.
“Squid Game” has taken the world by
storm. It is currently the moststreamed
show on Netflix in all but a handful of
the company’s markets. It has entered
mainstream cultural consciousness,
spawning millions of videos on TikTok,
thousands of memes and dozens of
earnest articles dissecting the show’s
meaning. Cafés all over the world have
started selling their own takes on dalgo-
na, a Korean candy featured in one epi
sode. In Paris fights broke out as fans
tried to force their way into a popup
shop where visitors could pose with staff
dressed like the pinksuited enforcers
from the show.
The brutality of the competition has
also rung true for ordinary South
Koreans struggling with unaffordable
housing and a sluggish labour market.
Politicians have begun referring to the
show when attacking opponents. Yet
after a brief spell at the top of the Korean
Netflix charts, “Squid Game” has been
overtaken by “Hometown ChaChaCha”,
a saccharine kdrama.
Asianculturalexports
Tentacular spectacular
S EOUL
South Koreans are bemused bytheglobalsuccessof“SquidGame”
Cephalo soldiers
The global craze has prompted be
musement in South Korea. “Nobody
around me understands the global hype,
and neither do I,” says Inyoung, a 26
yearold from Seoul who stopped watch
ing after a couple of episodes because it
disturbed her to see her childhood games
depicted as a brutal struggle for survival.
One Korean critic speculates that the
combination of violent entertainment
with a very ontrend critique of capital
ism explains the show’s appeal to West
ern audiences, who are used to such
themes from American productions such
as “The Hunger Games”, set in a dysto
pian world of grave social injustice.
No doubt the hypnotic geometry of
the design, the lush costumes and emi
nently memeable stills also help—as
does Netflix’s strategy of dubbing and
subtitling its productions in dozens of
languages. That had already created hits
such as “Lupin”, a French thriller with an
underlying theme of social injustice,
which the Korean show is likely to de
throne as the company’s most successful
nonEnglish production.
The embrace of “Squid Game” is a
reflection of South Korea’s outsize cul
tural power on the global stage. It may
also have benefited from following in the
footsteps of “Parasite”, a film about—
what else—social injustice, which won
the Oscar for best picture in 2020. But
most of all, it shows that, like love and
money, complaints about inequality
have no language.