Photographer turns focus to innocent victims
“On August 25, I heard there were about 650,000 Rohingya people that travelled across the border (of Bangladesh and Myanmar) at gunpoint,” Mr Reardon said.
He felt there was little sympathy for the majority Muslim group in Australia and felt a desperate need to hear and share their stories with the world.
He travelled to a refugee camp to try to “humanise these people with photographs”.
“I tended to focus on kids because many people assume (the Rohingya) are all fighting men,” Mr Readon said.
He visited several camps including those at the southern tip of Bangladesh, just 50 metres from the Myanmar border.
“I was overwhelmed by the welcoming of me by the Rohingya people — it was similar to what I experienced (at the refugee camps) in Greece. In some ways, they (refugees) put us to shame. They’re less judgmental.”
The camps were huge and bustling, some filled with more than 200,000-250,000 people.
The supplies were minimal — Mr Reardon saw thousands of children, but they had little in the way of formal education and he never saw them playing with toys or reading books.
But the people were very welcoming. Mr Reardon said everyone he visited, or spoke to wanted the western world to see and hear what was happening.
“I have got these photos of all these people who were opening up to me,” he said.
“People who were allowing me to photograph them without their veil.
“These people have been raped, they have had their babies thrown on to fire — and here they are trusting me to enter into darkened rooms.”
One woman, Hasina, told Mr Reardon that soldiers threw her daughter on to a pile of burning clothes. One-year-old Sohaifa died instantly.
“They tore her from my arms,” she told CNN reporters.
“They threw her into a burning pile of clothes. They had started a fire using people’s belongings. And they threw her into the big burning pile.”
Mr Reardon works with journalists including Rohingya man Rease TinMaungNu who now lives and studies in Toronto.
Mr TinMaungNu spoke to a 20year-old man who said Rohingya people were being denied the right to study, effectively creating an uneducated generation.
“We couldn’t move from one place to another ... if we had a cell phone it would be notified and very soon, that person would be arrested,” he said.
The young man said as violence escalated, he and other Muslim boys could no longer stay at home and would have to run to the mountains and sleep at night for fear the military “would come and drag us away”.
“On the day of the massacre, all of a sudden after sunset they started firing at us. Some got shot on their heads, some on their heels, people ran for their lives in all directions,” he said.
“We hid in the jungle for a few days before moving to the next village.”
There they found a pile of dead bodies.
“Everyone said, ‘This is our end as well, we were meant to come here to die and to join this heap of the dead’.
They spent the night fearing they would be ambushed and slaughtered at any moment.
In November last year the Myanmar Government signed a deal with Bangladeshi authorities to complete, within two years, the return of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled an army crackdown last year in Myanmar.
The process, set to start in January, has already been delayed.
A former schoolteacher told Mr Reardon he could not return to the same people who had committed genocide.
“I want to thank the government of Bangladesh and the international NGOs from all over the world for giving us food and shelter,” the man said.
“But my brother, ever since the repatriation deal has been announced, we cannot eat that food, we cannot sleep in that shelter. We don’t need any of that. How can the world send us back to the same people who committed genocide on us? Is that the law of this world?”
“Instead of commencing the repatriation on January 23 as they talk about it, why don’t you simply drop a bomb on all of us and give us peace right here, forever?”