Refugees recall horrors from Rakhine
Laura Bond from World Vision NZ went to Bangladesh to witness the impact of the Burma refugee crisis. What she found was heartbreaking
The sorrow chokes the air like a thick smog. No one in the small tent speaks, their eyes heavy with tears. After several sombre minutes, the translator gains his composure.
“And then what happened?” he gently asks. “They raped the women and then killed them. They cut their breasts off,” says Mitali, her voice ringing with grief and anger. “Everyone joined in. How can I begin to express it? They danced round like it was a festival for them.”
Moments before that happened, she said, several hundred men from her village were rounded up by the attackers. Among them were her husband and three brothers. They were all shot, she says.
The 22-year-old immediately fled Burma, also known as Myanmar, becoming one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims escaping violence in the country’s Rakhine state. She took her three children and ran for her life from the land that had once nourished her body and soul.
With nothing but the clothes on their backs, Mitali and her children — aged 5, 3 and 1 — made the five-day trek surviving on water and dry biscuits until they reached the coastline. There, they surrendered all their money to a local boatman in exchange for a ride across the Naf River to the relative safety of Bangladesh where, tired, confused and terrified, they spent a night under the guard of the Bangladesh military, sleeping on the ground and beneath the stars with all the other desperate people.
Bleary-eyed and stunned, the next day they entered into a new kind of suffering; life in a noisy, overcrowded and muddy shanty town covering thousands of hectares in what’s now the world’s fastest-growing refugee settlement. Mitali is now among
618,000 others who have fled to Bangladesh from Rakhine state since August 25, when the Burmese military began an operation against militants who attacked 30 security posts and an army base in Rakhine. The United Nations has said the crackdown amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Bangladesh, a country smaller than the South Island, was already struggling to meet the needs of its 163 million citizens before the crisis.
Once inside the settlement, and with her three young children clinging to her side, Mitali made a shelter for the family, cutting a 4m-by3m base into a clay hillside and fixing a flimsy tarpaulin to bamboo sticks. Each night as darkness falls, she hurries her children inside and there they remain until the sun rises over the mangled metropolis.
Now, just four weeks on, her children sit close beside her in this tent as she tells her story for the first time; a tale of bloodshed, loss, fear and uncertainty.
“What makes me saddest is that my children don’t have anyone to call father anymore,” she says. “I don’t The United Nations says 618,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Burma’s Rakhine state for Bangladesh since August 25. What makes me saddest is that my children don’t have anyone to call father anymore. I don’t even have a photograph of my husband. even have a photograph of my husband.”
Relief agencies are doing their best to deal with the humanitarian crisis, but the needs are massive. World Vision has been able to provide clean water and food to more than 105,000 people so far, including Mitali and her family. This is in addition to basics such as thousands of sleeping mats and blankets, and tarpaulins to keep the monsoon rains and approaching winter at bay.
For 12-year-old Rana, his happy life with his parents and six siblings was turned upside-down last month.
As the shooting started near his home, everyone scattered and he ran for his life. He hid for three days and nights on the side of the road before making his way to the border and joining the flow of people running towards the safety of the open body of water.
“No one was with me,” he says. “I thought I would die like my parents.”
Frightened of water, Rana knew he had to get in the boat to survive. He clung tightly to a 20-year-old man he recognised from a nearby town. The man was already supporting his heavily pregnant wife and carrying his 2-year-old child but helped to shelter the terrified boy.
Rana is now one of 22,000 orphans so far accounted for and wanders the sprawling settlements alone.
You can donate to World Vision’s Myanmar refugee response at worldvision.org.nz, or at any branch of The Warehouse nationwide Change on the cards in Chile
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