Rohingya women, girls recount stories of rape
Victims describe systematic violence by groups of men from Myanmar’s security forces
UKHIA, Bangladesh — The use of rape by Myanmar’s armed forces has been sweeping and methodical, The Associated Press found in interviews with Rohingya Muslim women and girls now in Bangladesh.
They were interviewed separately, ranged in age from 13 to 35, come from a variety of villages in Myanmar, described assaults between October 2016 and mid-September and now live spread across several refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Foreign journalists are banned from the Rohingya region of Rakhine, making it nearly impossible to independently verify each woman’s report. Yet there was a sickening sameness to their stories, with distinct patterns in their accounts, their assailants’ uniforms and the details of the rapes themselves.
The testimonies bolster the United Nations’ contention that Myanmar’s armed forces are systematically employing rape as a “calculated tool of terror” aimed at exterminating the Rohingya people.
The Myanmar armed forces did not respond to multiple requests from the AP for comment, but an internal military investigation last month concluded that none of the assaults ever took place. And when journalists asked about rape allegations during a government-organized trip to Rakhine in September, Rakhine’s minister for border affairs, Phone Tint, replied: “These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances — do you think they are that attractive to be raped?”
Doctors and aid workers, however, say that they are stunned at the sheer volume of rapes, and suspect only a fraction of women have come forward. Medecins Sans Frontieres doctors have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, a third of them under 18. The youngest was 9.
The U.N. has called the Rohingya the most persecuted minority on earth, with Myanmar denying them citizenship and basic rights. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees now live in sweltering tents in Bangladesh, where the stifling air smells of excrement from a lack of latrines and of smoke from wood fires to cook what little food there is. The women and girls in this story gave the AP their names but agreed to be publicly identified only by their first initial, citing fears they or their families would be killed by Myanmar’s military.
Each described attacks that involved groups of men from Myanmar’s security forces, often coupled with other forms of extreme violence. Every woman except one said the assailants wore militarystyle uniforms, generally dark green or camouflage. The lone woman who described her attackers as wearing plain clothes said her neighbors recognized them from the local military outpost.
Many women said the uniforms bore various patches featuring stars or, in a couple cases, arrows. Such patches represent the different units of Myanmar’s army.
The most common attack described went much like F’s. In several other cases, women said, security forces surrounded a village, separated men from women, then took the women to a second location to gang rape them.
The women spoke of seeing their children slaughtered in front of them, their husbands beaten and shot. They spoke of burying their loved ones in the darkness and leaving the bodies of their babies behind. They spoke of the searing pain of rapes that felt as if they would never end, and of dayslong journeys on foot to Bangladesh while still bleeding and hobbled.
They spoke and they spoke, the words erupting from many of them in frantic, tortured bursts.
Here are the accounts as told by 21 women and girls.
The Associated Press reported this story with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
She is only 13
She is only 13, but R had already learned to fear the military men. Last year, she says, soldiers stabbed her father in the head with a knife, killing him.
One day in late August, 10 soldiers barged into R’s house. They snatched her two little brothers, tied them to a tree and beat them.
R tried to run out the front door, but the men caught her. They tethered her arms to two trees. They ripped off her earrings and bracelets, and stripped off her clothes.
R screamed at them to stop.
They spit at her. Then the first man began to rape her. The pain was excruciating. All 10 men forced themselves on her before she passed out.
R’s older brothers carried her toward the border. Once in Bangladesh, a doctor gave her emergency contraceptives.
That R’s family sought treatment for her at all is an anomaly. Despite still suffering pain, bleeding and infections months after the attacks, only a handful of the women interviewed by the AP had seen a doctor. The others had no idea free services were available, or were too ashamed to tell a doctor they were raped.
R desperately misses her little brothers, and her sleep is plagued by nightmares. She struggles to eat.
Before the rape, she says softly, she was pretty.
Raped twice
F and her husband were asleep at home in June when seven soldiers charged into their bedroom. The men bound her husband with rope and gagged him with a scarf they ripped from F’s head.
They yanked off F’s jewelry and stripped off her clothes. They threw her to the floor, where the first soldier began to rape her.
Her husband wriggled the gag from his mouth and screamed. One soldier shot him, and another slit his throat.
After the assault, the men dumped F’s naked body outside her home and set it on fire. The neighbors rescued her. Two months later, she realized she was pregnant.
In September, her nightmare began again. F was asleep at a neighbor’s house when five soldiers broke down the door.
The soldiers slashed the throat of the 5-year-old boy who lived there and killed his father. They stripped off the women’s clothes. Two men raped F, and three men raped her friend.
After the men left, the women — so crippled by pain and catatonic from the trauma that they could not even lift themselves to use the toilet — lay on the floor for days before fleeing for Bangladesh.
Despite everything, F is determined to love the child. But she prays her baby will be a boy — because this world is no place for a girl.
Her husband blamed her
K and her family were settling down to breakfast one morning in late August when they heard the screams of other villagers outside. Her husband and three oldest children bolted out the door.
But K was nearly nine months pregnant and had two toddlers to watch. She couldn’t run anywhere.
The men barged in, threw her on the bed, yanked off her jewelry and stole the money she had hidden in her blouse. They ripped off her clothes and tied down her hands and legs with rope. When she resisted, they choked her. And then they began to rape her. She was too terrified to move. One man held a knife to her eyeball, one a gun to her chest. Another forced himself on her. Then they switched places. All three men raped her.
She began to bleed and was certain her baby was dying. She blacked out. When she awoke, the men had gone. Her husband blamed her for the assault, admonishing her for not running away and threatening to leave her because she had been raped by a “non-Muslim.”
Thefamily fled to Bangladesh. Two weeks later, K gave birth to her son.
But her trauma persists. The thrum of a helicopter hovering over the camp sends her into a panic and she recites the Muslim prayer for the moments before death. She is convinced the aircraft is Myanmar’s military, coming to kill them all.
When told she is strong, she looks up with tears in her eyes.
“How can you say that?” she asks. “My husband says he is ashamed of me. How am I strong?”