Muslim minority refugees fleeing to Bangladesh to escape
persecution recount horror stories of atrocities carried out by state troops
 |
| Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh after crossing the Naf River this month Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times |
A pack of soldiers stepped toward a petite young woman
with light brown eyes and delicate cheekbones. Her name was Rajuma, and she was
standing chest-high in the water, clutching her baby son, while her village in
Burma burned down behind her.
“You,” the soldiers said, pointing at her.
She froze.
“You!”
She squeezed her baby tighter.
In the next violent blur of moments, the soldiers clubbed
Rajuma in the face, tore her screaming child out of her arms and hurled him
into a fire. She was then dragged into a house and gang-raped.
By the time the day was over, she was running through a
field naked and covered in blood. Alone, she had lost her son, her mother, her
two sisters and her younger brother, all wiped out in front of her eyes, she
says.
Rajuma is a Rohingya Muslim, one of the most persecuted
ethnic groups on earth, and she now spends her days drifting through a refugee
camp in Bangladesh in a daze.
She relayed her story to me during a recent reporting
trip I made to the camps, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya like her have
rushed for safety. Her deeply disturbing account of what happened in her
village, in late August, was corroborated by dozens of other survivors, whom I
spoke with at length, and by human rights groups gathering evidence of
atrocities.
Survivors said they saw government soldiers stabbing
babies, cutting off boys’ heads, gang-raping girls, shooting 40-millimetre
grenades into houses, burning entire families to death, and rounding up dozens
of unarmed male villagers and summarily executing them.
Much of the violence was flamboyantly brutal, intimate
and personal — the kind that is detonated by a long, bitter history of ethnic
hatred.
“People were holding the soldiers’ feet, begging for
their lives,” Rajuma said. “But they didn’t stop, they just kicked them off and
killed them, they chopped people, they shot people, they raped us, they left us
senseless.”
Human rights investigators said that Burma's military
killed more than 1,000 civilians in the state of Rakhine, and possibly as many
as 5,000, though it will be hard to ever know because Burma is not allowing the
United Nations or anyone else into the affected areas.
Peter Bouckaert, a veteran investigator with Human Rights
Watch, said there was growing evidence of organized massacres, like the one
Rajuma survived, in which government soldiers methodically slaughtered more
than 100 civilians in a single location. He called them crimes against
humanity.
On Wednesday, the United Nations (UN) human rights office
said that government troops had targeted “houses, fields, food-stocks, crops,
livestock and even trees,” making it “almost impossible” for the Rohingya to
return home.
Burma's army has claimed it was responding to an attack
by Rohingya militants on 25 August and targeting only the insurgents. But
according to dozens of witnesses, almost all of the people killed were unarmed
villagers, and many had their hands bound.
 |
| Hundreds of Rohingya arrive by boats in the safety of darkness on Shah Porir Dwip island, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh (Paula Bronstein/Getty) |
Satellite imagery has revealed 288 separate villages
burned, some down to the last post.
Human rights groups said the government troops had one
goal: to erase entire Rohingya communities. The unsparing destruction drove
more than half a million people into Bangladesh in recent weeks. UN officials
called the campaign against the Rohingya a “textbook example” of ethnic
cleansing.
Nearly each night here in coastal Bangladesh, up the Bay
of Bengal from Burma, bodies wash up in the foamy brown tide — children, men,
old women who tried to escape on leaking boats, their faces bloated from
seawater.
Rajuma barely made it to Bangladesh, escaping on a small
wooden boat a few weeks ago. She cannot read or write. She does not have a
single piece of paper to prove who she is or that she was born in Burma. This
may be a problem if she applies for refugee status in Bangladesh, which has
been reluctant to give it, or ever tries to go home to Burma. She thinks she is
around 20, but she could pass for 14 — painfully thin, with wrists that look as
if they could easily break.
She grew up in a rice farming hamlet called Tula Toli,
and she said the place had never known peace.
The two main ethnic groups in her village, the Buddhist
Rakhines and the Muslim Rohingya, were like two planes drawn to never touch.
They followed different religions, spoke different languages, ate different
foods and have always distrusted each other.
A community of Buddhists lived just a few minutes from
Rajuma’s house, but she had never spoken with any of them.
“They hate us,” she said.
Azeem Ibrahim, a Scottish academic who recently wrote a
book on the Rohingya, explained that much of the animosity could be traced to
World War II, when the Rohingya fought on the British side and many Buddhists
in Rakhine fought for the occupying Japanese. Both sides massacred civilians.
After the Allies won, the Rohingya hoped to win
independence or join East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh), which was also
majority Muslim and ethnically similar to the Rohingya. But the British, eager
to appease Burma's Buddhist majority, decreed that the Rohingya areas would
become part of newly independent Burma, setting the Rohingya up for decades of
discrimination.
Burma's leaders soon began stripping their rights and
blaming them for the country’s shortcomings, claiming the Rohingya were illegal
migrants from Bangladesh who had stolen good land.
“Year after year, they were demonised,” Ibrahim said.
Some influential Buddhist monks said the Rohingya were
the reincarnation of snakes and insects and should be exterminated, like
vermin.
The persecution fuelled a new Rohingya militant movement,
which staged attacks against Burma security outposts on 25 August.
 |
| Newly arrived Rohingya refugees board a boat as they transfer to a camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh (Cathal McNaughton/Reuters) |
Over the next few days, Rajuma watched huge fires burn on
the horizon. The military was beginning what it called “clearance operations.”
Rohingya villages all around Tula Toli were burned to the ground, and on the night
of 29 August, an elder came from the mosque to Rajuma’s house to deliver a
message: The Buddhists say we should go to the river, for our safety.
Her family decided to stay put. “Nobody trusts a
Buddhist,” Rajuma said.
The next morning, Rajuma was busy making potato curry. As
she sprinkled ginger and chiles into a big pot, she sensed something and
stopped.
She crept to the window and peeked out: soldiers, dozens
of them, jogging toward Tula Toli.
Rajuma and her family tried to run but were quickly captured
and marched to a riverbank where hundreds of other terrified villagers had been
taken prisoner.
The soldiers separated the men from the women. The
villagers pleaded for their lives and dropped to their knees, hugging the
soldiers’ boots. The soldiers kicked them off and methodically killed all the
men, said Rajuma and several other survivors from Tula Toli, all interviewed
separately.
The women and young children were sent into the water and
told to wait.
In terms of the tactics used, the weapons fired, the
openness of the killings, the gang rapes and the level of military
organization, the accounts from many different Rohingya areas present a
distressing harmony.
“Stories of atrocities are universal,” said Anthony Lake,
the executive director of UNICEF.
He said he was deeply troubled by what Rohingya children
had been drawing in the camps — guns, fires, machetes and people on the ground
with red streaming out of them.
 |
| Over a half a million Rohingya refugees have fled into Bangladesh since late August causing a humanitarian crisis in the region (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) |
On 27 August, Hassan said, around 20 soldiers from a
nearby army base stormed into Monu Para and ordered all the men and any boys
older than 10 to report to the house of a prominent Rohingya cattle trader.
The soldiers tied everyone’s hands behind their backs.
They made them sit in the yard, heads down.
Around 400 men and boys were hunched over, Hassan said.
They were sweating through their shirts. An army sergeant whom the villagers
knew then pulled out a long, thin knife.
“People were calling for help,” Hassan said. “The boys
were screaming out their mother’s name, their father’s name.”
Hassan said that in front of his eyes, dozens of people
were decapitated or shot. He was shot three times — twice in the back and once
in the chest — but all the bullets missed vital organs.
After the soldiers left, Hassan said, he stumbled away to
his house, where his sister stuffed turmeric powder, the best they could do for
an antiseptic, into his wounds.
Human rights investigators said the gravest atrocities
they have documented were committed from 25 August to 1 September, the period
right after the militant attacks. Many witnesses described government troops
wantonly killing anyone they could get their hands on
In Tula Toli, Rajuma fought as hard as she could to hold
onto her baby, Muhammad Sadeque, about 18 months old.
But one soldier grabbed her hands, another grabbed her
body, and another slugged her in the face with a club. A jagged scar now runs
along her jaw.
 |
| A Rohingya refugee child washes utensil in the in the Balukhali refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh (Reuters) |
“They threw my baby into a fire — they just flung him,”
she said.
Rajuma said two soldiers then pulled her into a house,
tore off her veil and dress and raped her. She said that her two sisters were
raped and killed in the same room, and that in the next room, her mother and
10-year-old brother were shot.
At some point, Rajuma thought she had died. She lost
consciousness. When she woke, the soldiers were gone, but the house was on
fire.
She sprinted out naked, past her family’s bodies, past
burning homes, and hid in a forest. Night fell, but she did not sleep.
In the morning she found an old T-shirt to wear and kept
running.
Many people in the refugee camps have been eerily stoic —
seemingly traumatised past the ability to feel. In dozens of interviews with
survivors who said their loved ones had been killed in front of them, not a
single tear was shed.
But as she reached the end of her horrible testimony,
Rajuma broke down.
 |
Rohingya
Muslim refugees react after being re-united with each other
after arriving in
Whaikhyang, Bangladesh on a boat from Burma Getty
|
“I can’t explain how hard it hurts,” she said, tears
rolling off her cheeks, “to no longer hear my son call me ma.”
She hunched over on a plastic stool in another family’s
hut, covered her mouth with a red veil and started sobbing so hard she could
barely breathe.
A few other refugees looked over at her but went on
cooking or cleaning. Outside, on a road not far away, trucks blared their
horns, fighting through traffic.
Source: The New York Times
Visit here to read breaking news of
persecuted Rohingyas: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MirAhmedABSiddiquee