On Friday April 21, 1961 Burma Broadcasting Service announced ‘more broadcasts in national languages’. Programmes for both the ‘Rohinja’ and the Arakanese Buddhist (Rakhine) communities were added. The actual broadcasts began on August 22, 1961.
“Once a week I would recite the Koran on the radio and then tell the news in the Rohingya language. The Rohingya language program on Burma Broadcasting started in 1961 but was then canceled in 1965. We were very sad when our program was canceled. Then, we all were the same. We all had equal rights and enjoyed life. Now, nothing is left.”
Irshad Hussein, Rohingya elder
2018
Irshad sits in his hut in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. He was one of the original Rohingya radio broadcasters in the early 1960s. Along with 700,000 other Rohingya, he was forced out of Myanmar during a campaign of genocidal violence in 2017. Irshad passed away in 2021. He was 108 years old.