Our Bodies, Their Battlefield

‘If she could, I know my Dorcas would have contacted me. She has my phone number in her head. I’ve been calling and calling her old mobile for five years now, but she never answers. I don’t care if she’s converted to Islam or not, if she’s had a baby or not, I just want her to come back.

‘They say some of the girls have died, but I’m sure Dorcas is alive. I go to church every day and pray for her to come back. I hope one day God will answer.’

* ‘Nigeria’s Stolen Girls’, New York Times, 6 May 2014.

4

Queue Here for the Rape Victim

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

How do you decide which child to save when Burmese soldiers are pointing guns at you? That was the impossible dilemma of Shahida, a Rohingya mother I met in December 2017 shortly after arriving in Kutupalong camp to which she and hundreds of thousands of others had fled. And how do you live with the decision?

Afterwards, when I think about that camp, I think about noise. And children everywhere. With uncertain faces and inappropriate clothes from well-meaning donations, a boy in a belted woman’s cardigan of cream wool with a fur collar, a girl in a fairy dress with pink tutu and high heels like boats for her tiny feet. Someone had been teaching them a few words of English. ‘Bye-bye!’ they shouted as they passed by.

It was all a bit overwhelming after the long series of flights from London to Doha then Dhaka then Cox’s Bazar in northeast Bangladesh, where the airport terminal carried the unlikely message ‘Welcome to the Honeymoon Resort’, and the Mermaid Beach hotel greeted me with a green coconut adorned with a cocktail umbrella and an invitation to sign up for a romantic candlelit dinner on what was apparently the world’s longest beach.

I dumped my stuff in one of the small thatched cottages with psychedelic names amid a grove of palm and papaya trees, watched by an audience of chattering monkeys, and set off along the coast road.

Dotted along the way were piles of concrete pyramids stamped disconcertingly with the words Tsunami Protection. ‘Like the Venus of Willendorf,’ said my interpreter Reza, who turned out to be an artist.

Banners hung across the road emblazoned with large photographs of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina under the words ‘Mother of Humanity’. The title might surprise minorities or opponents abducted, tortured or locked up by her regime. Human rights organisations had recorded at least 1300 extrajudicial killings by state forces since she came to power in 2009 as well as an election in 2014 in which almost half of MPs won seats without anyone voting for them.

The banners referred to her opening of the border to fellow Muslims from neighbouring Burma. The refugees were Rohingya, a name few outside had heard of until the last few days of August 2017. People started pouring into Bangladesh from Rakhine state in western Burma, crossing the Naf river by boats or makeshift rafts or even swimming. Soon as many as 10,000 a day were coming.

It was monsoon season so they were arriving bedraggled and muddy, some bloodied from knife or gunshot wounds, and many starving after days or weeks in the jungle with nothing to eat but leaves. Most were mothers and children and they came with unimaginable stories of Burmese soldiers and Buddhist mobs moving into their villages, slaughtering the men, setting fire to their huts, then raping the women and girls often in front of their family.

Within three months more than 650,000 had been driven out – two thirds of the Rohingya population. The UN called it a ‘textbook example’ of ethnic cleansing.

As we turned off through emerald paddy fields where women in colourful wraps were standing among the rice shoots, and into what aid workers called a ‘mega camp’, I feared that I might have become a bit jaded after all the refugees I had spoken to over the previous few years,

Raped, beaten and widowed – Madina, Munira and Shahida (Paula Bronstein)

Then I met Shahida, wrapped in a raven-grey scarf, and batting away flies, inside a flimsy shelter of black plastic over bamboo poles on a muddy path. Across the path was a leaking latrine and the stench was overpowering, as was the screeching from two cocks scrapping outside. A boy who looked about five passed by carrying a bundle of firewood almost the size of himself, occasionally stopping to put it down and look at it, as if astonished by the absurdity.

She was one of three young widows staying together from the same village in Rakhine state. Each wore a different-coloured scarf and each had lost a husband and a child.

Munira, the eldest at thirty and brightest in canary yellow, was the most anxious to speak. ‘First they came for the men,’ she said, recalling the night a few months earlier in late September when Burmese soldiers burst into their homes in Borochora in Maungdaw. ‘Then two days later they came for us.

‘It was around 2 a.m. and I was breastfeeding my baby when I heard the first shot. Then there were so many it was as if it was raining fire. I could see flames in the distance from all villages around burning and rockets flying overhead.

‘That’s when the soldiers took the men, tying their hands with bind. Then two days later they came back, again after midnight, shouting, “Come out and see what happened to your husbands!” They entered our homes, pointed guns at our hearts and dragged us out.

‘They took all the girls and women of the village to a rice field and lined us all up – maybe forty or so – and forced themselves on us. To start with we were all screaming but in the end it was quiet, we could cry no more.

‘I was raped by five men, first one then the next. They beat me and slapped me and kicked me and bit me. I was too terrified to move. I saw two girls dead near me. By the time the sun came up I was barely conscious.

‘When I came to, I couldn’t walk but only crawl. There were bodies all around. I tried to find my children. Then I saw a small boy lying face down, shot in the back. It was Subat Alam, my eldest. He had been running towards me. He was eight.’

Also in the paddy field that night was Shahida, twenty-five, the lady in grey. She had grabbed her six-month-old baby son and two-year-old daughter when the soldiers burst into her hut. Tears spilled from her eyes as she told me how desperately she tried to shield them.

‘They were in my arms and soldiers came to snatch them away,’ she said. ‘I tried to hold them but I could only protect one. They grabbed my baby boy and threw him to the ground then I heard a shot as I was running. I didn’t look back as I worried I would lose my daughter too.’

Pushed into the line of women at gunpoint, her heart was pounding so much she could barely stand. ‘I’d heard about women being raped in other villages,’ she said. ‘Then they bound my wrists against a banana tree and raped me.

‘I was raped by one solder and was crying and shouting as he assaulted me. Afterwards he wanted to shoot or knife me but it was too dark.’

Somehow she escaped to the jungle where she found her three remaining children huddled together in terror.

‘As the sun rose, we saw everything,’ she said. ‘All the cattle, chicken and goats killed and our houses burnt down. People beheaded, their limbs cut off, or shot.’

The call for prayers from the mosque on the hill started up, making it hard to hear, as the third widow Madina, in a dusky pink scarf, recounted her tale, particularly as the little boy she was nursing had joined in with his own wailing. His left hand was swollen and badly infected.

‘I was sleeping when the soldiers burst in,’ she said. ‘I managed to flee with my three children to the hill behind. I was very scared because I was five months pregnant. If a woman is pregnant they cut out the foetus from her belly. They think Rohingya are not humans. They want to wipe us out.

‘Then one soldier saw me and grabbed me. I was terrified he would feel my swollen belly. They had big knives and machetes.’

As he raped her in the forest, she repeatedly prayed for the baby she was carrying. ‘I was shouting so my children cried,’ she said. ‘They were scared. That’s when they took my eldest.

‘I never saw him again. We know if the children are taken they are killed.

‘I think the Burmese army are the worst people in the world,’ she added, using her scarf to wipe away her tears.

‘If we had knives we would kill them,’ said Shahida.

The three women eventually managed to escape, passing a graveyard east of the village then hiding for a month in the jungle with other rape survivors as well as elderly and children from the village.

‘We were hiding under bushes, moving from one place to another,’ said Munira. ‘It was raining day and night and we had no hope. We women had lost our appetite because of all the horror but our children were crying for food. All we could give them was fruits and leaves. Some days all we had was water from streams. We had to keep moving as the military were searching everywhere. Some people had managed to bury their crops before fleeing so after a week they went back to the village to dig up some millet but the soldiers saw them and shot them in the head. We kept seeing dead bodies. Some had died a few days before. Others were fresh.’

‘It was hard to sleep,’ said Shahida. ‘I would see those soldiers on me and pray for help.’

Eventually they crossed the river to Bangladesh and safety. But their torment was not over and perhaps never would be.

Apart from the ghosts in their heads, the slaughter of their husbands had left the women as sole providers and protectors of their children, not easy anywhere but particularly in this conservative Muslim society, and they were struggling. ‘The children have no sweaters or warm clothes and the babies have diarrhoea,’ said Madina.

‘We just get basic needs, rice, lentils and oil but we have no mat to sit on or pillow or utensils or jerry can to collect water,’ said Shahida. ‘And no one will marry us after what happened and with all these children.’

Even the most conflict-weary of aid workers and journalists seemed shocked by the Rohingya. It was not that their individual stories were worse than anything we had heard before, though many were, but it was more the sheer scale of what had happened. Every single shack had terrible stories and I had never come across such widespread violation of women and girls.

It was also the conditions. The camp was filthy with pools of green fetid water dotted along the path. There were lots of latrines – 30,000, the relief commissioner informed me later. But these had been erected so hastily that many were already blocked and none seemed to have locks. Many were next to wells where children were collecting water from a tap. These had been dug so shallow that aid workers told me that more than three quarters of the wells were contaminated by faeces. Not surprisingly most people were suffering from diarrhoea. A quarter of the children were suffering malnutrition. Many of the women with babies were so stressed that their breast milk had dried up.

Nor was there any privacy. Bangladesh was already the world’s most overcrowded country, and its 165 million people among the poorest, so finding space for hundreds of thousands more was not easy. It was, said one aid worker, as if the whole population of Manchester had suddenly turned up on your doorstep.

Around half a million had been put into Kutupalong. If you climbed a hill the area looked like one of those relief maps in museums, dotted with makeshift dwellings up and down the hills as far as the eye could see. It was hard to believe that a few months earlier this area had been mostly forest. Some of it used to be an elephant reserve, which meant in the early days some refugees were trampled to death, though soon there were so many refugees even the elephants had been driven back.

The camp covered ten square miles and was divided into sections from AA to OO. There were signs for every aid organisation under the sun, some of which were marked ‘Child friendly spaces’ as if other places were not. The mosques seemed to command the best spots on the hills.

Tents stretching in every direction – Kutupalong houses more than 600,000 Rohingya refugees (Christina Lamb)

Through it all was an endless stream of people. A bearded man passed with a plastic bag of fish and an air of purpose. Pathways were lined with stalls of people selling things. A young man stood at a table with digital scales on which he was trying to weigh live chickens. A makeshift barber’s had a mirror and a painted board of hair styles, including the footballers Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo. I marvelled at the resilience of people who lost everything. What would we in the West do if we lost our homes and were dumped in a place with no electricity?

The refugees were living so on top of each other that they had less than half the internationally recommended minimum space. In other words all the conditions in which disease can thrive. There had already been an outbreak of measles and while I was there diphtheria broke out. António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, called it a ‘human rights nightmare’.

Every evening as dusk fell, the air darkened with smoke from thousands of campfires and made my eyes sting. There was so much coughing going on it was almost like a soundtrack to the camp, that and the cries of ‘Bye-bye’.

Foreigners were not allowed to stay after 5 p.m. I would often hear rumours of what happened then, how men on motorbikes would appear to snatch girls for prostitution. Refugees told me that at night they heard screams of children being taken. I never managed to find anyone who had lost a daughter this way but I did see scantily clad young Rohingya girls on the long beach in Cox’s Bazar touting their trade. Some said they were sold by their own families, desperate to supplement the rations of rice and lentils.

Yet talking to Rohingya it soon became clear that what was happening to them was nothing new. On a muddy island in the river where 6000 Rohingya had been stranded, I was greeted by Din Mohammad, a community leader in pebble-lensed glasses held together with tape, who presented me with a green bottle of fizzy drink. ‘We may be refugees but can still offer something to guests,’ he said and smiled.

I commented on his fluent English and he told me he had a psychology degree from Rangoon University. ‘I graduated in 1994, just before they barred Rohingya from higher education,’ he said. ‘Now I am fifty-one and I have never been allowed to practise. I scraped a living growing subsistence crops.

‘To the Burmese regime we are non-people. For decades they harassed us every day, sent our people to jail, didn’t give us citizen rights but alien cards as if we were foreigners. We had no rights, no education – there were primary schools in our villages but no teachers. We weren’t allowed to travel to another village without permission, which they refused, or even to get married, and they demanded more and more money for a licence.’

Nor were these the first to flee. Kutupalong was first established in 1992 when 300,000 Rohingya fled an earlier wave of repression. On the main road into the camp were shelters that looked more permanent made from corrugated iron.

Inside one I met Shahida Begum, a mother of five, who had arrived in that earlier wave twenty-five years earlier, when her village was burnt down. ‘In Burma the Buddhists are the majority and so have all the power and they don’t like the Muslim people,’ she explained. ‘I think they will not stop till they make all the Rohingya leave.’

She had taken in a Rohingya girl of fourteen called Yasmin who was sitting on a bed, wrapped in a marigold orange shawl patterned with red flowers. Above her was knotted a green mosquito net.

Yasmin never smiled and her small hands kneaded over and over as she explained how she ended up there. Her voice was so quiet I had to lean in to hear, straining to understand the unfamiliar place names which over the coming days I would hear over and over again. The noise of the children outside was soon lost.

‘I grew up in Chali Para village in Maungdaw district,’ she began. ‘We lived on rice and fish from the river. I was the breadwinner as my parents became too old and sick to farm, and we had to beg for food, which made me cry. I was the eldest – I had two little brothers aged three and four. I told my parents if I was a boy I would work then a neighbour taught me to sew teak leaves into garlands on bamboo rods for the thatched roofs of our huts. It took long but if I sewed a hundred garlands I would get 1000 myanmar kyat [about 47p] which was enough for a kilo of rice.

‘I would like to have learnt to read and write but we had no school: the Burmese authorities didn’t allow us. There was just a madrassa to study Koran.

‘The morning the Tatmadaw [the Burmese military] came, it was about 10 a.m. and I was taking a break from stitching leaves and playing outside our house with some friends. We didn’t hear the trucks as there is no road to our village so the soldiers had stopped on the main road and walked.

‘Five or six of them came to our house. They were in uniform with black masks and rucksacks. One soldier took a grenade from his rucksack and threw it inside where my mum and dad and two little brothers were. Immediately there were flames and I could hear them screaming.

‘I tried to run in but my friends pulled me back. Before our eyes the house burnt to ashes. We tried to run away as we knew the soldiers often took girls to rape. But they caught us. They took us to the jungle. I was scared and crying and screaming but one of the men put his hand over my mouth to stop me. They ripped my clothes, tied my hands behind me then two soldiers raped me, one after another.

‘The second one was saying “kill her” but I pleaded with them not to. I told them I already lost all my family, why kill me? Two of my friends bled so much they died, I don’t know what happened to the other. I can’t say what they did to me because when I think about those incidents I cry.’

She fell silent. Eventually she resumed the thread. ‘They left me naked. I just had a yellow scarf which I wrapped around me then I made my way very slowly to the river bank as I couldn’t walk well.

‘In the jungle I met a lady with her sons and she saw I was bleeding down my leg and asked me what happened. She gave me cloth to wrap round it and helped me to the river bank. It was full of people trying to cross. Boatmen wanted money and I had nothing. I told them all I have is this nose ring so they took that. It was the only thing I had from my parents.

‘We were about thirty people crowded into the boat. It had an engine but no roof against the rain and it took long, from dawn to early afternoon, maybe eight hours. Still, it was our good luck to find one as lots of people were on makeshift rafts which were very risky.

‘The boat took us to the island on the Bangladesh side. When we got there I left the lady because I was afraid. She had two sons about my age and I was scared they could also harm me so I said to her, “I will find my own way, Allah will be with me.”

‘Then I sat down and I was crying so hard that people of the island asked me what happened. They gave me rice cake and water and also some money to cross to Teknaf [on the Bangladesh mainland].

‘After that I walked ten minutes along the broken road and saw some Bangladesh army. They could see I was Rohingya and gave me biscuits and water then put me in a bus to the transit centre. I stayed there two days and was so tired I couldn’t talk. I was lying on the ground, my foot and stomach all swollen. Someone said she has no one and took me to Balukali camp.’

It was there that Shahida Begum found her. ‘I had gone to the camp with some food to meet relatives who had just arrived but when I got out of the tuk-tuk I saw a crowd of people round a girl so I went to see what had happened,’ Shahida explained. ‘She was so sick and weak and dressed only in a shirt on so I put her in the tuk-tuk and took her to the UNHCR clinic. They treated her for an infected thorn and also gave her a pregnancy test.

‘I thought I have four girls already, why can’t I look after her too? It’s difficult but by the grace of Allah we can manage. She has no one.’

She showed me around the small dwelling of four rooms with a cooking area in an outside lean-to. They had electricity in the form of a bulb but water had to be fetched from a pump. Yasmin shared a room with Shahida and one of her daughters. It was extremely cramped as another of her daughters was married with a son and husband who also lived there, making ten altogether. And things had become more difficult as Shahida’s husband had just lost his job as a schoolteacher. I wondered how many of us in the West would just take a girl in like that.

‘For the first few weeks I had nightmares every day about my family burning but I sleep with my auntie and sister and now they are fewer,’ said Yasmin. ‘They don’t make me do anything – I don’t go outside yet and stay inside helping with the cooking. Only occasionally I go to collect water from the tube well.

‘I’d like to go to school and learn to read and write. I know I am lucky that some girls who were raped died but I survived. I think those soldiers are the worst people in the world. Don’t they have daughters or sisters?’

Before I left she fixed her eyes on mine. ‘What happened to me was really bad and I don’t think any boy will marry me,’ she said. ‘Who can marry me now?’

The question was heartbreaking. Of course, life was never easy for Rohingya girls in their villages where they were often married off by her age. At least Yasmin was not pregnant and had found a caring family. But how do you get over something like this? There was little to distract them in the camps for once girls hit puberty most were rarely allowed out of the huts.

I have to admit I find all these stories not only shocking but disorienting. I had grown up associating Buddhists with peace, lotus flowers and meditation, and admiring Aung San Suu Kyi as a beacon of courage against tyranny. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her years of struggle, she had spent fifteen years under house arrest, separated from her British husband Michael Aris and their two sons. Even when he was dying of cancer back in Oxford, all she could do was send him a farewell video, dressed in his favourite colour with a rose in her hair. It arrived two days after his death.

Yet Aung San Suu Kyi was now Burma’s de facto head of state and had stayed silent as all these Rohingya were made stateless by her government and the appalling atrocities wreaked on them by the military.

The Burmese authorities did not even use the word Rohingya, instead calling them Bengalis as if they were migrants from Bangladesh, or demonising them as ‘maggots’, invaders or ‘a black tsunami’.

In fact, the Rohingyas had lived in Burma for centuries. Rakhine state, the rice-growing area where they live, used to be the Kingdom of Arakan and some reports had Muslims living there since the eighth century.

Persecution and rape were nothing new. Arakan was plundered by the Burmese monarchy after they conquered it in 1784. Francis Buchanan, a Scottish surgeon with the East India Company, who travelled there afterwards, wrote ‘The Burmans put 40,000 to death; whenever they found a pretty woman they took her after killing the husband and the young girls they took without any consideration.’*

It was plundered again by the British when it came under their rule in 1826 as part of the Indian Empire, later to be joined by the whole of Burma. Colonial authorities encouraged many more Muslims to come from Bengal as cheap labour in the paddy fields which caused resentment among the Buddhists.