UKHIA, Bangladesh (AP) — The soldiers arrived, as they often did, long after sunset.
It was June, and the newlyweds were asleep in their home, surrounded by the fields of wheat they farmed in western Myanmar. Without warning, seven soldiers burst into the house and charged into their bedroom.
The woman, a Rohingya Muslim who agreed to be identified by her first initial, F, knew enough to be terrified. She knew the military had been attacking Rohingya villages, as part of what the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing in the mostly Buddhist nation. She heard just days before those soldiers had killed her parents, and that her brother was missing.
This time, F says, the soldiers had come for her.
The men bound her husband with rope. They ripped the scarf from her head and tied it around his mouth. They yanked off her jewelry and tore off her clothes. They threw her to the floor. And then the first soldier began to rape her.
She struggled against him, but four men held her down and beat her with sticks. She stared in panic at her husband, who stared back helplessly. He finally wriggled the gag out of his mouth and screamed.
And then she watched as a soldier fired a bullet into the chest of the man she had married only one month before. Another soldier slit his throat.
https://youtu.be/sEhoAHI-zGM
Her mind grew fuzzy. When the soldiers were finished,
they dragged her naked body outside and set her bamboo house ablaze.
It would be two months before she realized her misery was
far from over: She was pregnant.
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The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar’s security forces
has been sweeping and methodical, the Associated Press found in interviews with
29 women and girls who fled to neighboring Bangladesh. These sexual assault
survivors from several refugee camps were interviewed separately and
extensively. They ranged in age from 13 to 35, came from a wide swath of
villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and described assaults between October 2016
and mid-September.
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 U.N.’s 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 (MSF) 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 military-style 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.
N, who says she survived a rape but lost her husband, her
country and her peace, speaks because there is little else she can do — and
because she hopes that somebody will listen.
“I have nothing left,” she says. “All I have left are my
words.”
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Two months after the men came quietly in the night for F,
they came boldly in the daytime for K.
It was late August, she says, just days after Rohingya
insurgents had attacked several Myanmar police posts in northern Rakhine.
Security forces responded with swift ferocity that human rights groups say left
hundreds dead and scores of Rohingya villages burned to the ground.
Inside their house, K and her family were settling down
to breakfast. They had only just swallowed their first mouthfuls of rice when
the screams of other villagers rang out: The military was coming.
Her husband and three oldest children bolted out the
door, fleeing for the nearby hills.
But K was nearly 9 months pregnant, with swollen feet and
two terrified toddlers whose tiny legs could never outpace the soldiers’
strides. She had no place to hide, no time to think.
The door banged open. And the men charged in.
There were four of them, she thinks, maybe five, all in
camouflage uniforms. Her young son and daughter began to wail and then, mercifully,
scampered out the front door.
There was no mercy for her. The men grabbed her and threw
her on the bed. They yanked off her earrings, nose ring and necklace. They
found the money she had hidden in her blouse from the recent sale of her
family’s cow. They ripped off her clothes, and tied down her hands and legs
with rope. When she resisted, they choked her.
And then, she says, they began to rape her.
She was too terrified to move. One man held a knife to
her eyeball, one more a gun to her chest. Another forced himself inside her.
When the first man finished, they switched places and the
torture began again. And when the second man finished, a third man raped her.
In the midst of her agony, she thought of nothing but the
baby inside her womb, just weeks away from emerging into a world that would not
want him, because he was a Rohingya.
She began to bleed. She blacked out.
As she awoke, her great aunt was there, tearfully untying
her. The elder woman bathed her, clothed her and gave her a hot compress for
her aching thighs.
When K’s husband returned home, he was furious: not just
at the men who had raped her, but at her. Why, he demanded, had she not run
away?
She was pregnant and in no condition to run, she shot
back. Still, he blamed her for the assault and threatened to abandon her,
because, he told her, a “non-Muslim” had raped her.
Fearful the men would return, she and her family fled to
her father’s house in the hills above the village. When they saw soldiers
setting fire to the houses below, they knew they had to leave for Bangladesh.
K was too crippled by pain to walk. Her husband and
brother placed her inside a sling they fashioned out of a blanket and a stick,
and carried her for days.
Inside her cocoon, she wept for the baby she feared was
dead.
A few days after the men burst into K’s house, 10
soldiers arrived at R’s.
She was just 13 years old, but R had already learned to
fear the military men.
Her parents had warned her to steer clear of them, yet it
was her father who first fell prey to their wrath. One day last year, R says,
soldiers stabbed him in the head with a knife, killing him.
Yet R’s family had nowhere else to go. And so they stayed
in the village. R busied herself by learning Arabic, doting on her chicken and
its hatchlings and caring for her two younger brothers.
And then one day in late August, R says, the soldiers
barged into her house. They snatched up her little brothers, tied them to a
tree outside and began to beat them. R tried to run out the front door, but the
men caught her.
Her body is barely pubescent; her limbs still gangly like
a child’s. But her youth could not protect her.
R fought back against the men, but they dragged her out
of the house. The skin tore away from her knees as her legs scraped along the
ground.
The men tethered her arms to two trees. They ripped off
her earrings and bracelets, stripped off her clothes.
R screamed at them to stop. They spit at her. And then
the first man began to rape her. She froze. She was a virgin. The pain was
excruciating.
The attack lasted for hours. She remembers all ten men
forcing themselves on her before she passed out. One of her older brothers
later found her on the ground, bleeding.
R’s two little brothers were missing, but their mother
had no time to search for them. She knew she had to get her daughter over the
border and to a doctor quickly to get medicine in time to prevent a pregnancy.
R was barely conscious. So her two older brothers carried
her across the hills and fields toward Bangladesh. R’s mother hurried alongside
them, terrified for her daughter, terrified that time was running out.
More than three months had passed since the men burst
into F’s home, and her despair had only deepened.
Neighbors had taken her in and cared for her. But her
house was gone, her husband was dead. And the timing of the attack left little
doubt that the baby growing inside her belonged to one of the men who had
caused all her grief.
She could only pray that things would not get worse. And
then, one night in mid-September, they did.
F was asleep along with the neighbors — a couple and
their 5-year-old son — when the men broke down the door, jolting everyone
awake.
There were five of them this time, she remembers. They
quickly grabbed the boy and slashed his throat, and killed the man.
Then they turned to the man’s wife, and to F. And her
nightmare began again.
They stripped off the women’s clothes. Two of the men
noticed the swell of F’s stomach and grabbed it, squeezing hard.
They threw the women to the floor. F’s friend fought
back, and the men beat her with their guns so viciously the skin on her thighs
began to peel away.
But the fight had gone out of F. She felt her body go
soft, felt the blood run between her legs as the first man forced himself on
her, and then the second. Next to her, three men were savaging her friend.
When it was finally over and the men had gone, the two
women lay immobile on the floor.
They lay there for days, so crippled by pain and
catatonic from the trauma that they could not even lift themselves to use the
toilet. F could smell the blood around them. As the house baked under the
punishing sun, the stench from the decaying bodies of her friend’s husband and
son finally overwhelmed her.
She would not die here. And neither would her baby.
She reached out for her friend’s hand and clasped it.
Then F hauled herself to her feet, pulling her friend up with her. Hand in
hand, the women stumbled to the next village. They spent five days recovering
there and then, alongside a group of other villagers, began the 10-day journey
to Bangladesh.
The monsoon season had begun, but there was nowhere to
shelter. So F kept walking through the downpours. She was starving, and her
battered body ached with each step. Generous strangers offered her sips of
their water, and one man gave her a few sweet rolls.
One day, she came across a 9-year-old boy lying along the
side of a road, wounded and alone. He had lost his parents, he told her, and
the soldiers had tortured him. She took him with her.
Together, the two made it to the shores of the Naf River
and boarded a boat to Bangladesh.
That is, where they live now, in a tiny bamboo shelter
between two filthy latrines. And it is
here that F prays her baby will be a boy — because this world is no place for a
girl.
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For now, the women are left to wonder how long they will
live in the bleak limbo of Bangladesh, and if they will ever return to their
homeland.
Since the rape, she has struggled to eat, and her
once-curvy frame has shrunk. Before the rape, she says softly, she was pretty.
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?”
F, whose body is starting to ache under the strain of her
pregnancy, finds her mind often drifts toward how she will care for the child
in the future. She believes God has kept them both alive for a reason.
Her parents, her brother, her husband are gone now. This
baby will be the only family she has left. For her, the most haunting reminder
of the agony she endured also, somehow, represents her last chance at
happiness.
“Everybody has died,” she says. “I don’t have anyone to
care for me. If I give this baby away, what will I have left? There will be
nothing to live for.”