TERRORISM DILEMMAS AND DEMOCRACY the common Southeast Asian drug yaba—a methamphetamine and caffeine-based drug that became popular among the Dhaka elite (Thompson, 2017) around 2006. Yaba seizures by the Department of Narcotic Control have increased from about 810,000 tabs in 2010 to 29 million in 2016. Traditionally, the drug was imported across the border from Myanmar, but more recently as the demand for the drug has grown, a number of yaba factories have emerged in Teknaf, operated by ‘influential locals’ (Chowdhury, 2015). While the Rohingya have certainly been used as drug mules, it is a stretch to assume their migration caused drug smuggling, as the article suggest. Refugees as a threat to law and order and national security: The front page of the 14 June paper reports on violence spilling into Cox’s Bazar from Myanmar, and includes an image of an armed border guard in military fatigues ‘reinforcing’ security at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camps within Cox’s Bazar—which clearly frames the Rohingya as aggressors and a threat to public law and order. ...local administration has beefed up security measures, tension prevails among the people of two Rakhine villages under the upazila and a locality under Teknaf Police Station as they are fearing attack by Rohingya refugees, who are also aggrieved at the loss of their relatives in Myanmar. (Barua, June 14, 2012) Using Rohingya as scapegoats for wider unrest is most stark in the coverage of a series of protests and violent attacks that swept across the Muslim world in response to a YouTube trailer for a film called Innocence of Muslims. On 11 September 2012, members of the Bangladesh Khilafat Andolan group attempted a march on the US Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, marking the start of violent outbursts across the country over the following weeks. On 1 October 2012, in a The Daily Star report on violence in Ramu and Chittagong, Government Home Minister Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir was quoted as saying ‘The government is aware of the Rohingya link with the violence’. He said as result, law enforcement had been ordered to maintain vigilance in areas housing Rohingya refugee camps. The minister’s claim which conflated the Rohingya with militants, was without evidence, yet went unchallenged in the reportage. While it is clear the Chittagong violence was a Bangladeshi offshoot of the global Muslim protests, the deliberate placement of blame on the Rohingya, is consistent with the wider narrative of Rohingya criminality and militancy which is at the heart of the newspaper’s coverage. However, it must be noted that a small number of news reports such as The Daily Star’s front-page article headlined ‘tearing out the soul’ by Inam Ahmed and Julfikar Ali Manik, from Cox’s Bazar, presented the violence in Ramu as a simple Buddhist-Muslim conflict, without any attempt to portion blame on the Rohingya (October 2, 2012). 272 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 25 (1 & 2) 2019