Raped Rohingya women’s babies start to arrive

MORE than 10 months since Burmese security forces launched a campaign of rape and other brutalities against Rohingya Muslims, babies conceived during those assaults have been born.

For many of the mothers the births have been tinged with fear – not only because the infants are reminders of the horrors they survived, but because their community often views rape as shameful, and bearing a baby conceived by Buddhists is considered sacrilege.

Some women ended their pregnancies early by taking cheap abortion pills available throughout Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Others agonised over whether or not to give their babies away. One woman was so worried about her neighbours discovering her pregnancy that she suffered silently through labour in her shelter, stuffing a scarf in her mouth to muffle her screams.

One girl, who would only be identified by the letter A, was raped at the age of 13 by soldiers who had broken into her home in Burma, an attack that drove her and her terrified family over the border to Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh’s overcrowded refugee camps, A knew that concealing her pregnancy would be difficult, and hiding a wailing newborn impossible. She worried that giving birth to the child would leave her so tainted that no man would ever want her as his wife. Her mother took her to a clinic for an abortion, but A was frightened.

A delivered a baby girl, but she decided not to keep the child and an aid worker took the infant.

“Even though I got this baby from the Buddhists, I love her,” she says.

“I carried her for nine months.”