Of rape in ‘army cleansing’
> UN medics see injuries to Rohingya women consistent with sex attacks
COX‘S BAZAR: Doctors treating some of the 429,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar recently have seen dozens of women with injuries consistent with violent sexual attacks, UN clinicians and other health workers said.
The medics’ accounts, backed in some cases by medical notes reviewed by Reuters, lend weight to repeated claims, ranging from molestation to gang rape, levelled by women from the minority group against Myanmar’s armed forces.
Myanmar officials have mostly dismissed such allegations as militant propaganda designed to defame its military, which they say is engaged in legitimate counterinsurgency operations and under orders to protect civilians.
Zaw Htay, spokesman for Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said the authorities would investigate any allegations brought to them.
“Those rape victim women should come to us,” he said.
“We will give full security to them. We will investigate and we will take action.”
Suu Kyi herself has not commented on the numerous allegations of sexual assault committed by the army against Rohingya women made public since late last year.
Violence erupted in Myanmar’s Rakhine following attacks on security forces by Rohingya militants last October.
Further attacks on Aug 25 provoked a renewed military offensive the UN has called “ethnic cleansing”.
Reuters spoke with eight health and protection workers in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district who between them said they had treated more than 25 individual rape cases since late August.
The medics say they do not attempt to establish definitively what happened to their patients, but have seen an unmistakeable pattern in the stories and physical symptoms of dozens of women, who invariably say Myanmar soldiers were the perpetrators.
It is rare for UN doctors and aid agencies to speak about rape allegedly committed by a state’s armed forces, given the sensitivity of the matter.
Doctors at a clinic run by the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) at the Leda makeshift refugee showed Reuters three case files, without divulging the identity of the patients.
One said a 20-year-old woman was treated on Sept 10, seven days after she said she was raped by a soldier in Myanmar.
Handwritten notes say she said soldiers had “pulled her hair” and a “gun used to beat her” before raping her.
Examinations often find injuries suggesting forced penetration, beating and even what looked like intentional cutting of the genitals, doctors said
“We found skin marks, it showed a very forceful attack, an inhuman attack,” said IOM medical officer Dr Tasnuba Nourin.
She had seen incidents of vaginal tearing, bite marks and signs that seemed to show a firearm was used to penetrate women, she said. – Reuters