‘Children like these are in a battle for their livelihood’: Ziaul Huque’s best phone picture

The word Ziaul Huque uses to describe the recent deadly violence against student protesters in his country of Bangladesh is “despicable”.

“In the end, the government could not survive by resorting to violence,” says Huque, who was once a university student himself. “History has repeatedly shown that no government can survive for long against a radical movement of students.” How quickly that political change can translate into solutions for the country’s many social and environmental problems remains to be seen, though.

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Huque, a freelance photographer, took this image on an iPhone 13 Pro Max at South Surma dumping site, in Sylhet. The garbage of the Sylhet City Corporation is brought here on a daily basis. “At an age when they should be heading off with a school bag on their shoulder, children like these are instead involved in a battle for their livelihood,” says Huque, who has an eight-month-old son. “Many people lost their homes in recent years due to frequent Covid outbreaks, floods, river erosion and other calamities, and they were forced to resettle in the city in search of a better future. Now they earn their living by filling plastic bags at the yard with bottles and selling them to factories in the city.” There’s no knowing where the parents of these children are, Huque adds.

On the day he visited, the children had finished collecting their bottles and gathered together for a game of football with friends. “For a moment,” Huque says, “they were happy.”