When a Rohingya refugee wrote his first speech in the English language just three years after he started learning the alphabet, he penned simple sentences that described deaths and massacres in his remote village, Kyauk Taw in the Rakhine state, Myanmar.

The 21-year-old Arif, addressing a small audience of refugees, activists and supporters of a refugee learning centre Elom Community Centre in Kuala Lumpur, had asked not to reveal his full name.

He wrote that when he was 10 years old, he saw people he...