Traffickers prey on lost Rohingya children in camps
The end of the cyclone season comes as a relief to most Rohingya in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong refugee camp. But not Noor Alom, who had been searching for his sixyear-old daughter for two days. Fatima left their home, which sits near three putrid latrines, to play on a nearby hillside - and never came back. “Nobody has any news about her,” Alom told the Thomson Reuters Foundation after another exasperating search in the blistering heat, his wife rocking on the floor beside him. “I am so worried that someone has sold her and taken her to another place,” he said. “People told me that it occurs here.”
His fears are not misplaced. The United Nations says trafficking networks already exist in southern Bangladesh’s sprawling camps, which have been overwhelmed by the arrival of more than 600,000 Rohingya fleeing Myanmar over the last two months. It says killings, arson and rape of Rohingya Muslims by troops and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist mobs since Aug. 25, in response to coordinated Rohingya insurgent attacks on security posts, amount to a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Six out of ten of the new arrivals in the Bangladesh camps are children, providing a fertile hunting ground for traffickers looking for young girls to recruit as maids. Thousands of children have, at some point, been separated from their families amid the chaos. “It is a major, major risk,” said Jean Lieby, head of child protection at the UN children’s agency (UNICEF) in Bangladesh.
“Young girls might enter into this type of trafficking and then end up in one of the big cities.”
Kidnappers
Nazir Ahmed, a Rohingya refugee in the camp, set up an information center two months ago, which he said has already reunited some 1,800 lost children with their parents. Despite its important title, the center’s only equipment is a wooden table and a megaphone. But, from the moment the sun rises, it is inundated with people looking for their loved ones. “For the Rohingya who have just come here, this place is new,” said Ahmed. “If they go far from their house, they can easily get lost.”
On the morning the Thomson Reuters Foundation visited, two toddlers sat beside Ahmed, staring with terror at the wall of bodies in front of them. “We are telling all brothers of the Rohingya, two children have been found and now they are with us,” Ahmed announced over the megaphone, to the amusement of one child. “If these children are yours, you can take them,” he said, describing their red and yellow T-shirts, and how one had no pants on while the other had a toy in his hand. “If they belong to your relative, you can inform them that they are here.”
Ahmed does not disclose the children’s names to protect them from potential traffickers. To claim a child, a parent must correctly recite their name and the child must confirm that the adult is their mother or father. Ahmed is only too aware of the threat of human trafficking in Kutupalong. Only a day earlier, an unfamiliar man tried to snatch a child sitting on a footpath. He was swiftly attacked by the child’s relative who was buying food from a nearby shop. “We are telling all the people that there are kidnappers here, so be careful with your children,” Ahmed said.