Rohingya women find new roles
Bangladesh refugee camps offer freedoms not found in Myanmar
ON A blue mat in their mud and bamboo home in the middle of the world’s largest refugee settlement, Mohammad Selim is pacing his daughter Nasima Akter, 9, on her taekwondo drill.
As a taekwondo champion in his Rohingya district in Myanmar before fleeing to Bangladesh 18 months ago, Selim dreamt of making a career of his sport. He is hoping his daughter can instead follow that path.
He said in Myanmar it was impossible to teach her, as taekwondo was considered improper for girls and he didn’t have time, but their flight to camps near Cox’s Bazar in south-east Bangladesh has started to change his society’s rules for women.
Women and girls make up about 55% of the 900 000 plus mainly Muslim Rohingya living in about 34 sprawling, crowded camps and they are needed to work or run households as many have lost their husbands.
“I want my daughter to learn taekwondo and one day represent us as a champion,” Selim, 35, said.
“Our society is conservative and we prefer covering our women, but in taekwondo you are covered so people can’t question a girl participating. We practise inside to not get criticised, but many people regret they cannot teach their daughters.”
With most Rohingya in Bangladesh for 18 months and life starting to become more routine in the camps, Selim is not the only one breaking away from the Rohingya’s previous lifestyle, where women rarely left the house and were segregated from men.
He is hoping to get approval to teach taekwondo to other girls in the camps where children do not have access to formal education but can attend learning centres until age 14.
More than 730 000 Rohingya have fled Buddhist-dominated Myanmar since August 2017 to escape a military offensive the UN called “ethnic cleansing” of one of the world’s most oppressed people, joining others in Bangladesh. The chance of returning soon looks remote.
Myanmar has denied most allegations of persecution.
Aid agencies and NGOs working alongside Bangladesh’s government in the camps were aware from the outset that women and girls were vulnerable to sexual and other violence, both on their journey and in the camps.
To address this, they have set up women-only projects and committees to encourage women to get involved in the community as well as counselling services for those who faced abuse.
But not all Rohingya men used to a conservative Islamic lifestyle are happy to see women taking on new roles and making decisions, adding to the risk of domestic violence which aid groups said was on the rise in the camps.
“Some men say it is a sin for women to work because in Myanmar we never worked,” said Nuran Kis, 40, a Rohingya mother of eight, who is teaching others to sew in a women-only centre. “My husband supports me, though, because we need money and want to survive.”
Shameema Akhter, who co-ordinates eight women-friendly spaces in Balukhali camp for Brac, Bangladesh’s largest NGO, said some men were reluctant to allow women and girls to come to these centres, but gradually that was changing. She said they ran craft sessions for the women and girls, taught them to sew, talked to them about the risk of rape, human trafficking and child marriage, how to manage hygiene, and provided oneon-one counselling for anyone abused.
Akhter said when they arrived many girls were given sanitary pads, but had no idea how to use them and cut them up as face tissues while handouts of cereal, a food item not known to the Rohingya, were sold at markets for a fraction of the real value.
Most of the Rohingya are illiterate, having had limited access to education – and health care – in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where they were refused citizenship and free movement.
“Many of the girls were depressed and traumatised about being raped or being forced by their families to get married and they were shy,” Akhter said. “But now they want to come here and learn skills that might help them and their families in the future.”
Under Bangladesh government rules, Rohingya cannot take formal employment, but they can join cashfor-work schemes run by NGOs in the camps to earn about 400 Bangladeshi taka (R70) a day – and some have taken roles previously for men only.
Dola Banu, 35, is one of the women building roads and other infrastructure under a Site Maintenance Engineering Project run by UN agencies International Organisation for Migration, World Food Programme and UNHCR.
“This is the first time I have ever done any kind of work like this,” Banu said while taking a break from carrying bricks for a new road. “I like this work and want to keep doing it as long as I can to support my family.”
She is raising her four children as a single mother after her husband died.
Aid workers said the new roles were giving women confidence and they more were willing to take leadership roles in the community. |
IN A shelter made of plastic sheets and bamboo next to a reeking stream in the world’s largest refugee settlement, Rohingya Nazma Akter recalled how her daughter was trafficked seven months ago.
Rashida, 17, was picked up next to a clinic in a camp in southeast Bangladesh, while her mother visited the doctor, by a man who had been courting her by phone for sometime.
The man, however, turned out to be a trafficker.
Two days later, Rashida was rescued by the police at Jashore, a regional hub for sex trafficking about 500km north of the camps near to Bangladesh’s border with India.
It has been 18 months since more than 730000 mainly Muslim Rohingya fled persecution in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar and set up camps across the border in a coastal district about 40km south of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh’s top tourist location.
The camps, sprawled over about 2 428 hectares have become more organised but recent police activity suggested the risk of being trafficked has increased due to the promise of work and better lives.
For there are no signs the Rohingya will be able to leave the camps any time soon. Plans for repatriation were put on hold by the Bangladesh government last November amid protests in the camp with a vow no one will be sent back against their will.
“In the middle there were talks about repatriation. Once that slowed down, we noticed an increase in trafficking,” said Major Mehedi Hasan, company commander of Bangladesh’s elite police force Rapid Action Batallion (RAB).
Latest police records showed that on January 30, police at Jashore rescued five Rohingya girls and one boy, all teenagers, from being trafficked into India.
Six days earlier, RAB officers rescued 11 Rohingya Muslims from Chittagong, a major coastal city and financial centre in southeast Bangladesh about 170km from the camps.
Last November, law enforcement agencies rescued 57 Rohingya refugees from Malaysia-bound boats on three different occasions.
Jishu Barua, programme co-ordinator for Young Power in Social Action, a non-profit group that deals with trafficking, said an analysis of local papers suggested at least 200 Rohingya had been rescued here in the last three months.
“The numbers have increased. We are telling everyone to be more careful. We are spreading awareness through different events, such as street dramas and courtyard briefings,” Barua said.
The UN International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has identified about 204 cases of trafficking so far.
“But this is just a fraction of what we believe is happening,” said IOM spokesperson Fiona MacGregor, adding that young girls were particularly vulnerable to being taken as domestic workers both locally and within Bangladesh.
“There are cases where people don’t know what is going on and then others that do take the risk because they feel there is no other choice.”
The government view is that improving people’s livelihood at the camps was the only way to curb human trafficking from the area that was known to be at the heart of a people smuggling business long before the Rohingya influx.
Bangladesh bans the Rohingya from leaving the camps, or holding jobs other than participating in smallscale cash-for-work programmes run by humanitarian agencies.
In the past, traffickers misled hundreds of people who wanted to go to Malaysia and trapped them in camps in the border areas of Thailand and Malaysia, torturing them until their families agreed to pay up to $1 800 (R24 000), a fortune for impoverished migrants.
This came to light in 2015 with the discovery of scores of mass graves believed to contain the bodies of Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants.
“Trafficking was present in the past and it is present today as well,” said Shamimul Huq Pavel, a government officer with the Refugee, Relief and Repatriation Commission, a government organisation created to deal with the Rohingya crisis.
“We are trying to improve the situation in the camps here. Once that happens, the situation will improve.”
With trafficking on the rise, Bangladesh law enforcers have also stepped up activities to crack down on trafficking, as has Malaysia, which announced last month it would set up an official inquiry to investigate human trafficking camps in border areas.
“We have increased our surveillance near the boat areas,” said Hasan.
While Akter was relieved to get her daughter back, she knew she would have to keep her story quiet. Their names were changed in this story to protect their identities.
“If people knew her story, no one would marry her,” said Akter, stressing that the Rohingya were a conservative community in which men and women were largely segregated in Myanmar.
While Rashida escaped public stigma on her return, 28-year-old Ramida Khatun – who also requested anonymity for her security – from the largest camp, Kutupalong, was not so lucky.
Last May, Khatun was forced by her husband to travel to Sylhet, a city 500km from the camps, along with a trafficker to get a Bangladeshi passport so the couple could go to Malaysia.
According to Khatun’s uncle, she went to Sylhet with two other Rohingya women and stayed at a hotel with the trafficker for nine days before the police rescued her.
When she returned to the camp, she faced public insults from the leader of her block for days and those memories haunt her.
“The insults have stopped. No one troubles me now. But whenever I think about those days, my head begins to hurt a lot,” Khatun said. |