No refuge for Rohingya
DISPOSSESSED: Those seeking safety in Bangladesh bring with them heartbreaking tales
THE Myanmar soldiers came in the morning, the young mother said. They set fire to the concrete-and-thatch homes, forcing the villagers to cluster together. When some of her neighbors tried to escape into the fields, they were shot. After that, she said, most people stopped running away.
“They drove us out of our houses, men and women in separate lines, ordering us to keep our hands folded on the back of our heads,” said 20-year-old Mohsena Begum, her voice choking as she described what happened to the village of Caira Fara, which had long been home to hundreds of members of Myanmar’s minority Rohingya community.
She said when about 50 people had been gathered together, the soldiers, along with a group of local men, pulled four village leaders from the crowd and slit their throats.
Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation, the Rohingya have long faced persecution in Myanmar, where most are denied citizenship. The latest outbreak of violence was triggered by October attacks on guard posts near the Bangladesh border that killed nine police officers. While the attackers’ identities and motives are unclear, the government launched a massive counter-insurgency sweep through Rohingya areas in western Rakhine State. Most Rohingya live in Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh.
The government, which has implied the attacks were carried out by Rohingya sympathisers, has ac- knowledged using helicopter gunships in support of ground troops in the sweep. While survivors and human rights groups have tracked waves of anti-Rohingya violence in recent weeks, the Myanmar government insists that stories like Begum’s are exaggerations.
Myanmar’s leader, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has accused the international community of stoking unrest.
“It doesn’t help if everybody is just concentrating on the negative side of the situation, in spite of the fact that there were attacks on police outposts,” she said in an interview on Singapore’s Channel News Asia.
Suu Kyi, whose party took power in March, has been accused of not acting to curb the violence against the more than one million Rohingya believed to be in the country.
“It helps if people recognise the difficulty and are focused on resolving these difficulties rather than exaggerating them, so that everything seems worse than it really is,” she said in the interview.
But Begum said she had no need to exaggerate what happened in Caira Fara.
She said after the four leaders were killed, violence churned through the village in chaotic scenes of horror. Begum’s husband, a farm labourer, was beaten and then murdered by having his throat slit, along with an unknown number of other villagers, she said. Their bodies were eventually driven away in a truck.
She said attackers knocked her young son knocked from her grasp, then raped her.
Finally, when the soldiers were not paying attention, she grabbed her son and ran into the nearby hills. After hiding for two days, her brother gave her enough money — about US$38 (RM168) — to pay smugglers to get her and her son into Bangladesh.
When Bangladeshi border guards stopped them, she began to weep.
“I told them I have no one to protect me there,” she says, and told them: “‘Look at my baby! He will die if I go back there.’” After that, they let her pass.
Much of Rakhine has been closed to outsiders, including journalists, since the violence began. However, former United Nations secretarygeneral Kofi Annan, leader of a commission formed to investigate the situation in Rakhine, was allowed to visit in recent days.
Seeking reconciliation, Annan yesterday urged the army to respect civilians’ rights.
Some 15,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh over the past month, often brought in by smugglers, according to police and intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the government refuses to release numbers publicly. They have joined up to 500,000 undocumented Rohingya who have been living in Bangladesh after arriving from Myanmar in waves since the 1970s.
Some 33,000 registered Rohingya refugees live here. Bangladesh does not welcome Rohingya — its maritime patrols sometimes turn back refugee boats full of them — but it is seen as a haven compared with Myanmar.
The UN says up to 30,000 Rohingya have abandoned their homes amid the recent violence. Satellite images analysed by rights group Human Rights Watch show 1,250 structures destroyed last month in Rohingya villages.
Osman Gani, a thin, fast-talking Arabic teacher, fled after his village, Gouzo Bil, was attacked on Nov 11.
“They came and killed mercilessly. They burned our homes,” said Gani. “No one was there to save us.”
He hid with his family for about a week near the village. But when searches intensified, and with soldiers targeting men, he was forced to leave Myanmar without his family.
“I came to the bank of the river and started swimming,” he said. His family was able to join him in Bangladesh a few days later.
As he fled north, he used his mobile phone to film the destruction in other Rohingya villages he passed through. In some, the blackened remains of what appear to be children can be seen amid the wreckage of homes.
Gani’s voice can be heard in some of the videos, but The Associated Press could not confirm their authenticity.
“They (the army) fired at us from aircraft,” Gani said.
“People were killed in front of my house. They chased the girls and gunned them down. And they burned many people. They burned them in front of my house.
“I have shot videos!” he said, holding out his mobile phone to a reporter. “Don’t you see the charred bodies?”
While he was initially in hiding after the attack, Gani said he also managed to slip back into his village and film what remained of his home.
He pans through the ashes and broken concrete. “This is my land, my home,” he said. “This is Puitta’s. This is Uncle Yunus.” AP