Refugee Art Is Becoming Evidence in Atrocity Cases

Enayet Khan fled Myanmar in 2017 with nine other members of his family, moving through forests and fields for three days while fires closed in behind them. Each village offered only temporary safety; by morning it, too, would be burning. His own home was already ash. Khan watched armed soldiers shoot people in front of him, and three members of his family were injured on the way out before they crossed into Bangladesh.

“I lost everything,” Khan told Hyperallergic in a phone call. “Home, documentation, property, a sense of security.”

He settled in Cox’s Bazar, now home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees. The Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination and repression under Myanmar’s successive governments, and a 1982 law stripped them of citizenship, leaving them one of the largest stateless groups in the world. Most fled in 2017 to escape what the piece describes as the military’s crimes against humanity and genocide.

In the camps, Khan turned to painting and drawing to process what he had seen: burning homes, fleeing families, executions. He went on to train other refugees in the same work, founding the Rohingya Art Club and pushing visual storytelling as both expression and resistance.

Khan is one of many refugees using art to record experiences of conflict and violence, according to Hyperallergic’s reporting. Legal experts the outlet spoke to say that kind of work can also feed accountability efforts, conveying testimony, corroborating survivor accounts, and even entering legal proceedings as evidence of mass atrocities.

The demand is growing. Hyperallergic cites a record 117.8 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, a figure 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 up 44% between 2016 and 2021. The International Criminal Court has itself called the rise in demand from displaced people turning to international courts “unprecedented.”

For some legal advocates, art is one way to meet it. 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. Mulvey noted that high illiteracy among Rohingya people, especially women and children, makes traditional written statements hard to record. In those settings, drawings became a vital way to convey their testimonies.

The piece, originally reported by Hyperallergic, frames art made by refugees and incarcerated people as doing double duty: a form of therapy for the person making it, and a record that can carry weight when survivors seek justice.