Traffickers prey on lost Rohingya kids in camps
BANGLADESH: The end of the cyclone season comes as a relief to most Rohingya in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong refugee camp. But not Noor Alom, who had been searching for his 6-year-old daughter for two days.
Fatima left their home, which sits near three putrid latrines, to play on a nearby hillside – and never came back.
‘‘Nobody has any news about her,’’ Alom said after another exasperating search in the blistering heat, his wife rocking on the floor beside him.
‘‘I am so worried that someone has sold her and taken her to another place,’’ he said. ‘‘People told me that it occurs here.’’ His fears are not misplaced. The United Nations says trafficking networks already exist in southern Bangladesh’s sprawling camps, which have been overwhelmed by the arrival of more than 600,000 Rohingya fleeing Myanmar over the last two months.
It says killings, arson and rape of Rohingya Muslims by troops and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist mobs since August 25, in response to co-ordinated Rohingya insurgent attacks on security posts, amount to a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Six out of 10 of the new arrivals in the Bangladesh camps are children, providing a fertile hunting ground for traffickers looking for young girls to recruit as maids.
Thousands of children have, at some point, been separated from their families amid the chaos.
‘‘It is a major, major risk,’’ said Jean Lieby, head of child protection at the UN children’s agency (Unicef) in Bangladesh.
‘‘Young girls might enter into this type of trafficking and then end up in one of the big cities.’’
Nazir Ahmed, a Rohingya refugee in the camp, set up an information centre two months ago, which he said has already reunited some 1800 lost children with their parents.
Despite its important title, the centre’s only equipment is a wooden table and a megaphone. But, from the moment the sun rises, it is inundated with people looking for their loved ones.
‘‘For the Rohingya who have just come here, this place is new,’’ said Ahmed.
‘‘If they go far from their house, they can easily get lost.’’
On the morning the Thomson Reuters Foundation visited, two toddlers sat beside Ahmed, staring with terror at the wall of bodies in front of them.
Ahmed is only too aware of the threat of human trafficking in Kutupalong. Only a day earlier, an unfamiliar man tried to snatch a child sitting on a footpath. He was swiftly attacked by the child’s relative who was buying food from a nearby shop.
‘‘We are telling all the people that there are kidnappers here, so be careful with your children,’’ Ahmed said.
Trafficking is not the only form of exploitation that young Rohingya face in Bangladesh.
Other desperate families are selling their children into bonded labour, most commonly in the fish drying industry that dominates the nearest city, Cox’s Bazar, Unicef said.
Families receive 18,000 taka (NZ$313) while their children work to pay off the debt during the ninemonth fishing season.
To encourage parents to keep their children in school, Unicef has given more than 400 poor families who arrived in 2016 the same sum in cash, plus grants to start small businesses.
The agency would like to offer cash grants to the latest arrivals as well, but funding is tight as millions of dollars are also needed for essentials like water and medical care.
With the spectre of child trafficking looming large over the Rohingya camps, Alom was fortunate. After a three-day search, he found Fatima crying on one of Kutupalong’s dusty streets.
‘‘My heart and mind were broken, no-one knew anything about her,’’ he said.
‘‘Once I saw her I was so very happy, I don’t care what happened or where she went, I am just so happy.’’
– Thomson Reuters Foundation