TERRORISM DILEMMAS AND DEMOCRACY Framing statelessness and ‘belonging’ Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh’s The Daily Star newspaper Abstract: Stripped of Myanmarese citizenship in 1982 and persecuted for three decades, stateless Rohingya have long found precarious refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. This study explores the framing of the Rohingya in Bangladesh’s largest circulating English language newspaper The Daily Star, to examine how one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers of record framed refugee migration into the country. Analysing two distinct random samples of news stories published on The Daily Star website between 1 December 2011– 31 November 2012 and 1 August 2017–31 October 2017, this article argues that The Daily Star’s press identity, defined though a nationalist frame, failed to successfully deliver human rights-based journalism though a globalist Fourth Estate imperative. Keywords: Bangladesh, conflict media, Fourth Estate, human rights journalism, Myanmar, refugees, Rohingya KASUN UBAYASIRI Griffith University, Brisbane Introduction HE ROHINGYA have long been persecuted in Myanmar. Stripped of citizenship in 1982 and discarded as recent interlopers from Chittagong during British colonial occupation, successive Burmese governments have dismissed their historical links to the region and relegated the Rohingya to a purgatory of statelessness. Their precarious existence in Myanmar’s south-western state of Rakhine became even more tenuous after decades of simmering ethnic tension with government-backed Rakhini Buddhists escalated into communal violence in June 2012. In the past five years alone the Rohingya have faced two distinct waves of violence—the June 2012 clashes and the October 2012 resurgence of violence, sparked by false claims that a Rohingya man had raped and murdered a 27-year-old Rakhini Buddhist woman (International Crisis Group, 2016); and the spread of violence following the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s alleged T 260 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 25 (1 & 2) 2019