The most persecuted people on Earth?

ARKAM was 12 when he watched men beat his father’s head with a brick and slaughter him with a knife. The family had been walking home from the mosque near their village in Rakhine, Myanmar’s westernmost state, when a stone-throwing mob blocked their path. Their Buddhist neighbours had ordered them to stop practising Islam. The murder was a punishment for clinging to their faith.

Now 18 years old, Arkam lives in a shipping container on a building site on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. He bunks with seven other Rohingyas, all refugees from Myanmar; they are among several hundred migrants living in containers stacked two storeys high along a single muddy track. By day they earn slightly less than the minimum wage building an apartment block, whose half-finished skeleton looms above their camp; in the evenings they can buy food and clothes from mobile stallholders who stop outside. Their containers are brightly lit and fairly clean, but the air reeks of sewage.