COX’S BAZAR,
Bangladesh/YANGON (Reuters) - Inside a bamboo shelter on Bangladesh’s eastern
coast, 58-year-old Sait Banu held a dog-eared note from her husband. “If you
find a good match for my daughter Una Jamin, you can arrange her wedding,” he
urged her in the letter.
“Don’t worry; there is no
problem in jail.”
The message, sent from a
prison hundreds of miles away in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, was the first Sait
Banu had heard from her husband since he was arrested in an army sweep last
August that forced more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims, including Sait Banu and
her nine children, to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
During weeks of violence
that the United Nations has called “ethnic cleansing,” soldiers killed, raped,
and arrested thousands of Rohingya, survivors and human rights groups said.
Myanmar denies the allegations.
With entire villages razed
and thousands believed dead, Red Cross workers say many of those stuck in
Myanmar prisons have been desperate to know if their families made it to the
safety of refugee camps in Bangladesh. And those on the other side of the
border, unable to go back, told Reuters they are equally keen to know if their
loved ones had survived.
Scraps of paper carried
between prisons in Myanmar and the camps by the International Committee of the
Red Cross are a rare source of hope for families torn apart by the largest and
fastest refugee influx in the region in the past twenty years, the refugees
say.
More than 1,600 notes have
been gathered from the Bangladeshi camps since August, the Red Cross says.
About 160 have been delivered to jails in Rakhine and the replies sent back to
Bangladesh.
Reuters saw copies of seven
notes, provided by Red Cross officials and hand-written on forms bearing the
letterheads of Red Cross organizations, but could not independently verify
their authenticity.
The letters often serve as
the first proof of life of loved ones. They also include snippets of family
news.
“I’ve been imprisoned for
three years. Please don’t worry for me,” one letter from a Myanmar jail reads.
“We’re always missing you
very much, and I know you’re also missing us,” reads another one sent from the
camps in Bangladesh to a Myanmar jail.
“Please send a picture of
everybody. I would be so happy to see you all. Give news of the children,” a
Rohingya man detained in Myanmar asks in a February letter delivered to his
wife in the camps in Bangladesh.
“HOW IS MY FAMILY?”
When Sait Banu’s husband was
arrested in their village in northern Rakhine one morning last August, she was
not told why the police were taking him. “They arrested 50 men from my village
that day,” she said. It took place only days before Rohingya insurgents struck
30 police posts on Aug. 25.
Spokesmen for the Myanmar
government and police did not respond to calls and e-mails seeking comment on
the arrests or on ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses against the
Rohingya, which they have denied in the past. They also did not respond to
requests for comment on the exchange of letters.
Myanmar has said it has
arrested 384 Rohingya on suspicion of links to the Muslim militant group,
Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) since last August.
More than 2,700 people were
detained in prisons in Rakhine state’s two main jails - in the state capital
Sittwe and Buthidaung in the north - according to the Myanmar National Human
Rights Commission, although it does not say how many of them are Rohingya.
Min Tun Soe, a spokesman for
Myanmar’s prisons department, declined to say how many people had been arrested
on accusations of ties to ARSA and said that only those formally charged were
kept in the jails.
With no idea where her
husband had been taken, Sait Banu was forced to escape without him. “They shot
and killed people, so we fled,” she said, referring to Myanmar security forces.
In December, Red Cross
volunteers near her shelter called on refugees who wanted to write to their
families. She had heard from relatives that most men from her village had been
sent to Sittwe prison, so she gave her husband’s name and other details. Red
Cross staff in Myanmar later traced him to Sittwe prison.
**11
ONLY SON ALIVE
When Yuzana, 30, a field
officer for the Myanmar Red Cross, visited the jail in February, she faced
anxious questions from Rohingya detainees. “They thought I’d met their
families,” she said. “They asked me: “How is my family? Do you know where my
wife is?”
Although written forms of
the Rohingya language exist, and there are efforts to digitize a script, none
is widely used in the camps.
But some of the refugees
speak Burmese or English. In Bangladesh, their messages are taken down by Red
Cross volunteers in English, often through a translator, while those from the
prisons in Rakhine are in Burmese so they can be read by the censors.
Because Myanmar censors all
communications in and out of the jails, the letters are limited to family news.
Rohingya cannot write about last year’s violence or why they were arrested, Red
Cross officials say.
Min Tun Soe, a spokesman for
the Myanmar Prisons Department, said it was normal practice to censor
communications in the prisons.
“We have to check whether
the information written in the letter affects the security of the prison or
not,” he said.
On a recent afternoon, a
volunteer for the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society - a Red Cross-funded
organization – at the Zadimura refugee camp read out a list of 16 Rohingya men
found alive in Buthidaung jail.
Among the refugees who
quietly gathered around him was Oli Mian, 70, hoping to hear the name of his
35-year-old son, Mohammed Rashid, was arrested in 2016.
When Oli Mian heard his
son’s name, he couldn’t believe it. Only when it was read out again and the
family details were confirmed he realized this meant his only son was alive.
His eyes welled up with tears and he walked with his wooden stick back to his
shelter to tell his wife.
“If my son was here, I
wouldn’t have to stand in the long relief distribution lines for hours to get
food,” he said, as tears fell onto the wrinkled hands folded on his lap.
“I’ll write to him that I
want to hear his voice,” his wife Roshan Begum said, also fighting back tears.
“I’ll tell him his parents
are alive.”