The announcement of a deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh which will allow the repatriation of the Rohingya may sound like good news. Here is why it is not.

USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith and Director of Global Initiatives Karen Jungblut traveled to Bangladesh over the week of Thanksgiving to record interviews with Rohingya refugees who fled genocidal violence in Myanmar.

Jamalida’s interview is among dozens of testimonies documented by USC Shoah Foundation since its arrival in November to the refugee camps in Bangladesh. A total of 11 life-history interviews with Rohingya are being added the Visual History Archive, the world’s largest repository of genocide testimony.

USC Shoah Foundation partners with CNN to share voices of Rohingya refugees.

The integration of the new collection means the Archive now represents nine genocidal events. USC Shoah Foundation last month added 11 Rohingya video interviews—as well as 77 testimonies from other collections—to its ever-expanding Archive.

An ISIS commander. Victims of the Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Inmates at Guantanamo Bay. They are among the many subjects portrayed in the work of three women who spoke this week about their experiences as journalists and filmmakers working in conflict zones and with traumatized individuals on a USC Visions & Voices panel jointly organized by USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art. 

Pictured: Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz who gave his testimony to the Azrieli Foundation in 2018. His interview is one of 31 new testimonies from the Azrieli Foundation that have been indexed and catalogued in the Visual History Archive. This week’s semi-annual VHA release adds 128 new testimonies to the 55,000-strong collection. All the updated testimonies are available at 163 access sites worldwide.

Three years ago today, August 25, 2017, the Myanmar army coordinated and implemented a genocidal attack on Rohingya communities and villages across Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

The coup in Myanmar earlier this week, ending the country's experiment with limited democracy, brought to power military and police implicated in carrying out genocide against the Rohingya people in 2017.    This troubling development could result in further consequences for the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities in Myanmar. More than 600,000 people remain at risk—perhaps now even more than ever.