Haunted, afraid and alone: the Rohingya orphans
The last, devastating memory Rohingya teenager Janata Begum has of her mother is when a Burmese soldier hacked her to death with a machete as she could not run from their family home. Janata, 15, and her brother Habib, 12, already fatherless, were forced to leave their disabled mother behind when the military attacked their village in Buthidaung, in Burma’s northern Rakhine state, burning down homes and shooting civilians, early one evening in late August.
The children, whose names have been changed to protect their identities, hid with neighbours in the forest for 15 days, inching their way towards safety in neighbouring Bangladesh through bursts of gunfire that felled people around them.
“We were starving and we slept on the muddy ground in the rain and got bitten by lice. Sometimes the water rose up to our necks,” Janata told The Daily Telegraph. They arrived heartbroken and distraught in the world’s fastest-growing refugee camp, located near Cox’s Bazar, southern Bangladesh, and which has officially absorbed 624,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees, but more likely closer to 700,000, since the military operation began on Aug 25.
In the sprawling, dusty Kutupalong and Balukhali adjoining refugee camps, where 58 per cent of the inhabitants are children, orphans can easily be lost in the throng. Worse, they are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and trafficking.
Burma and Bangladesh are in the process of forming a negotiating team to thrash out the details of a pact agreed late last month to repatriate the bulk of the refugees within the next two months. But many families who are trying to sort through the wreckage of their lives and still looking for lost relatives, torn apart during the chaotic flight from an ethnic cleansing campaign by the Burmese military, cannot even begin to contemplate returning yet.
The United Nations this week said it could not rule out that genocide had been committed and called for the perpetrators to be subject to an international criminal trial.
The trauma of bereaved children, many of whom have witnessed the slaughter of parents and have no home to return to, will be a lasting legacy of the crisis. According to the UN, close to 19,000 children have arrived in Bangladesh since August without parents, although the true figure may be higher. More than 5,200 have no relatives to care for them, creating “child-headed” households where teenagers look after younger siblings.
Janata and Habib found their paternal uncle through a Save the Children tracing programme which has reunited 24 children with their parents and 27 with other relatives.
The teenager said she was “happy” to have found him but she still feels bereft in the vast camp where food is scarce and she can no longer pursue her goal of becoming a seamstress.
Jane Alam, 12, is trying to locate his mother, whom he last saw as he and his three younger siblings and grandparents scrambled on to a boat
‘My father had a bullet wound in his eye and one in his side. I don’t want to go back to Burma. They will shoot us’
to cross the Naf River into Bangladesh. “We thought she was right behind us so we didn’t worry at first,” he said.
But his mother had disappeared. Having lost his father at sea eight years ago when he attempted to reach Malaysia, Jane now cares for his younger brothers and sister.
He finds some relief at a Britishfunded “Child Friendly Space” run by the UN children’s charity, Unicef, where children can play and talk through their distress with trained counsellors.
When he arrived, his drawings of helicopters firing on burning houses revealed more than his words about the savagery he had witnessed. Now he smiles, interacts with other children and prefers to draw flowers, but his pain still runs deep. “I miss my mother very much. She’s very beautiful,” he said. Case workers trying to trace her do not want to tell Jane that they have no leads, but like many Rohingya children, he has aged well beyond his years.
“I think she has been killed by the military,” he said matter-of-factly.
The scale of the crisis is hard to grasp. In just three months, a tent city the size of 2,300 football pitches, with a population greater than Washington DC, has sprung up across barren, unstable terrain and is still growing.
Saiful, 30, who arrived last Thursday said military violence in Rakhine was ongoing. His uncle, Abu Jafar, had been shot in Puimali village only 10 days before.
Aid workers privately dismiss plans to quickly repatriate refugees as a political smokescreen, as they fight to save lives in a health and nutritional emergency. Doctors are desperate to avert a cholera time bomb and to immunise young children from deadly bouts of measles.
Malnutrition rates were “alarming” among Rohingya children, said Shelley Thakral, a World Food Programme spokesman. One in four children under five are affected, with 7.5 per cent of them “severe” cases. In the feeding stations providing life-saving nutrition, dehydrated babies stare listlessly. Meanwhile, more than 60 per cent of the camp’s water is contaminated with bacteria from temporary latrines, fuelling more than 36,000 cases of acute diarrhoea.
It is hard to imagine more miserable living conditions. Yet Bangladesh, praised for its generosity towards the large influx of refugees, was last week criticised for reviving a £200million project to house 100,000 on an isolated, flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal. Despite the threat of exile to a remote island and the desperation of camp life, few refugees said they were willing to return to Burma.
Nir Ahmed, 65, first fled to Bangladesh in 1978 when 200,000 Rohingya were driven out of Burma by a similar military operation. He stayed for six months, but this time he only wants to return if the Rohingya are given citizenship rights. “People are very worried about the [repatriation] agreement. We suspect they will take us back to Burma and put us in camps,” he said. “I would rather tell Bangladesh just to kill us here.”
The fear of what awaits in Burma has now filtered down to a new generation of children scarred by unspeakable recent horrors.
Sisters Tosminara, eight, and Yasminara, 11, said their father, a boat repairman, had suddenly been arrested by soldiers in their home in Dudaing village, Maungdaw. The girls learnt of his execution through mobile phone footage of his body. “He had a bullet wound in his eye and one in his side,” said Yasminara.
Shortly afterwards, the sisters’ disabled mother told them to run for their lives, but could not join them. “Now we don’t know whether she is alive or dead,” said Yasminara.
“I miss my parents very much. I don’t want to go back to Burma. They will shoot us.”