The Rohingya Are Done Waiting for Justice
Exclusive: Reporting from The Hague, where the stateless community demanded the world name the violence they faced in 2017.
Temperatures were well below freezing in Buffalo, New York in the days after Nurul Amin Shah Alam went missing in February 2026. February was notoriously one of the snowiest months for the city, over a six-hour drive north of New York City.
U.S. Border Patrol agents had dropped off the 56-year-old blind Rohingya refugee at a coffee shop without shoes in frigid temperatures. His body was found five days later. Shah Alam had escaped the horrors of his home country, where the Burmese military had enforced a brutal crackdown against Rohingya in 2017 — causing hundreds of thousands of the ethnic minority to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Shah Alam arrived in the U.S. from Malaysia in 2024 with his family, as refugees seeking asylum.
Content warning: Mentions of violence and assault below.
While Shah Alam wouldn’t see justice for his people in his lifetime, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest court, is finally taking up the Rohingya plight. In January, the ICJ held three weeks of landmark hearings as survivors described the Burmese military junta’s atrocities: sexual assault, murder, razing villages to the ground. The Juggernaut reported from ICJ’s headquarters, The Hague, and spoke to Rohingya genocide survivors testifying for the first time, human rights experts, and witnesses to answer one question: will this be enough for the Rohingya to return home?