EXODUS
ONE ROHINGYA MAN’S TRAGIC TALE OF FLEEING MYANMAR.
Across the ferocious waves a nd t he churning black water, Alam Jafar could see his frantic sevenyear- old son gasping for breath, his arms flailing just above the ocean’s surface.
It was raining, and a fierce monsoon storm had transformed the sky and the sea into a kaleidoscope of grey shadows that was impossible to escape. The little boy was crying out louder than he ever had in his life. He did not know how to swim. “Papa! Papa! Help Me!” “Papaaaaa.” Just moments before, they had huddled together in a small fishing boat filled with refugees from Myanmar that was bound for Bangladesh. They were part of the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War — a colossal tide of more than 500,000 Rohingya Muslims whose homes had been torched by Buddhist mobs and soldiers.
What happened next, just 300 metres from shore, would take the lives of at least 50 people, most of them children, in the deadliest tragedy of its kind since the crisis exploded in late August. Through interviews with more than a dozen survivors, The Associated Press has reconstructed their illfated journey late last month — an odyssey that underscores the perils faced by all those who flee.
For Jafar, the most haunting part was not when the wave “as big as a mountain” swallowed everything in the blink of an eye.
It was the moment after, when he surfaced in shock vomiting saltwater, and heard the cries of the people who had been hurled into the dark mouth of the sea.
His wife of eight years and their newborn twins were among them.
So, too, was his beloved son. “Papa! Papa! Help Me!” “Papaaaaa.”
Short and stocky with a fiery temper, Jafar grew up in a small village in northwestern Myanmar called Moidaung.
It was a quiet place of immense beauty: Emerald rice fields. Lush mountains. A river that snaked through the land. For the Rohingya Muslims, though, it was also a prison — they could not travel without consent from authorities. The country’s Buddhist government denied them basic rights, and the United Nations called them the most persecuted minority in the world.
Despite their plight, Jafar had managed to do well for himself. The 25- year- old farmer lived in a four- room house surrounded by coconut and mango trees. He owned a verdant rice field and a boat.
In 2009, he married the love of his life, Tayiba Khatun, after saving enough to pay her dowry in gold: a necklace, a pair of earrings, and a small nose- ring. A year later, they had a son, Mohamed Zobair, an energetic boy who loved soccer and school.
In July, Khatun gave birth to twins, a boy named Yasin and a girl, Noor Khaida. But the happiness was shortlived. About a month later, Rohingya i nsurgents att acked dozens of police posts and an army base. In response, mobs backed by security forces began setting entire Rohingya villages ablaze. Word came to Moidaung of children shot and women raped. Too afraid even to venture into their fields, the Rohingya in Moidaung cowered in their homes. When ethnic Rakhine Buddhists began marching into the village with sharpened bamboo sticks and machetes, escorted by soldiers, Jafar and his wife watched from a window in their home.
“This is Buddhist land!” the men shouted. “It does not belong to you!
Two days later, just before dawn on Sept. 25, the mobs came back.
Woken by the crackle of gunfire and screams in the distance, Jafar looked outside and saw flames and smoke rising on the far end of Moidaung. Whole families had already begun fleeing on foot, carrying everything they could in huge plastic sacks.
“How can we just leave everything behind?” Khatun asked.
“We have no choice,” he whispered. “We can’t stay here. Our belongings are not going to save our lives.”
The road leading out of the village was overflowing with an endless stream of families — hysterical parents carrying children, exhausted children hauling babies on their backs.
Jafar’s family joined them, and word soon passed down the line. There was a beach where refugees were boarding boats for Bangladesh. To get there, they would have to cross the forested spine of the Mayu mountains.
The pathway up was slippery f rom t he monsoon rains, and they moved slowly. Many of the refugees were barefoot, including Jafar’s eldest son, Mohamed.
Wearing only a cheap pair of flip- flops, Jafar struggled to carry the twins, who were cradled in a pair of sacks that hung on opposite sides of a stick across his shoulders.
His wife carried another sack filled with children’s clothes, food and a mosquito net. Inside it was all their gold, the deed to their property, and all their savings — about US$225.
Fifteen minutes into the forest, they began to smell something nauseating.
The bloated corpse of a man with a wide gash in his throat lay staring up at the sky. A few metres further on, another dead man was curled on the ground, white f oam bubbling f rom his mouth.
They hiked for two days, scooping cold water from streams and sleeping on the ground. On the morning of Sept. 27, they finally spotted the coast — where the mouth of the Naf River, separating Myanmar from Bangladesh, opens into the Bay of Bengal.
It gave Jafar hope. He thought the hardest part of their journey was over.
On the beach in Alel Than Kyaw, the massive scale of the exodus became apparent.
Thousands of refugees from other parts of Rakhine were already camped there, exhausted. Each family had a story to tell, of a village burned, a husband shot, a wife raped.
A few hours after nightfall, a dozen fishing boats suddenly appeared, their distinctive bows and sterns each curved upward like wooden bull horns. Jafar and his family jumped to their feet and rushed forward with the crowds.
The boatmen, from Bangladesh, told the refugees they had been sent by “your relatives” — Muslim nations — “to take you across the river.”
One of them pointed at Jafar. “How many?” “Five.” The boatman counted off about 75 more people, in- cluding as many as 50 children, and told the adults they had to leave their luggage behind. Jafar tucked the gold he had given his wife as a dowry i nto a small plastic bottle cap, t hen wrapped her pink veil around it in a knot. He stuffed their cash and land deed into the other end.
They waded i nto t he warm water and climbed inside a seven- metre- long boat. They found a spot in the rear, and scrunched down together, the twins in their arms and Mohamed huddled between. The boat was packed.
When the engine started and they pulled away, the sea was calm. A crescent moon hung in a clear sky.
Khatun squeezed Jafar’s hand. It seemed as good a time as any to make the crossing.
The southern tip of Bangladesh was only about 10 kilometres away.
Over the next few hours, though, the weather grew steadily worse. Clouds began to obscure the stars. The wind began to pick up. And the air, once hot and sticky, grew chilly.
One by one, the refugees began to notice that the water, which had no perceptible scent at the mouth of the river, now smelled bitter. It was saltwater. Something had gone terribly wrong. They were at sea.
At dawn, a new feeling of dread set in — there was no land in sight.
“The ocean is going to kill us all,” said Khatun.
Sunrise brought one small ray of hope. It pointed the way east, which meant the coast of Bangladesh — had to be in the same direction.
Passengers drifted in and out of sleep. And then they were startled to hear one of the boatmen, wide- eyed, yelling. “It’s there! It’s there!” No one knew what country it was. No one cared.
Their two- hour trip — which had turned into 18 — might finally be about to end. As the boat motored toward the shore, though, the wind began to pick up again. The sky darkened. Torrential sheets of rain began to fall.
And t hen, somewhere around 3:30 p.m., the engine died.
Without power, the boat, only a few hundred metres from shore, was at the mercy of the monsoon waves.
When a giant wave hit, it thrust the boat upside down. It threw Jafar into the surging ocean with the twins, who were wrapped around his chest in a longyi.
Arms thrashing, he surfaced, trying to keep their heads above water. He could barely see, but he spotted his wife, and his son. He heard Mohamed crying out. “Papa! Papa! Help Me!” “Papaaaaa.” They were not far away, maybe three metres, when the second wave crashed down. He lost sight of them as the swirling ocean carried him away.
For half an hour, Jafar struggled to swim on his back in the current. But the waves and the weight of the twins kept pushing him down. He didn’t know if they were dead.
He was exhausted. When he realized he would drown if he held on to them any longer, he untied the longyi, and let go of his babies.
By the time he crawled onto the beach and collapsed, it was twilight. A stranger rushed forward and knelt beside him, asking if he was OK.
“Where am I?” Jafar asked weakly.
“Brother,” the man said. “You are in Bangladesh.”
That night, Jafar searched desperately for Khatun and Mohamed and the twins.
When he found their bodies, laid out on the sand by rescuers, he broke down and wept. Of the 80 refugees believed to have been on the boat when it capsized on Sept. 28, only 24 are known to have survived.
Khatun’s scarf, with the gold, money and land deed, was never found.
It is two weeks after the disaster, and Jafar is slicing bamboo poles to build a shelter on the edge of a new refugee camp. His older brother, who was also on the boat, is beside him. But he cannot bear to be here without his own family.
Sleep brings nightmares. Daylight brings ghosts. “Wherever I look, I see my kids,” he says. “I see my eldest child every day. He comes and sits in front of me, even now.”
“Why did I bring my children here and let them die in the water?” he asks. “Wouldn’t it have been nice if I too had died? Wouldn’t it?”
WHY DID I BRING MY CHILDREN HERE AND LET THEM DIE...?