Rohingya women who have fled Myanmar are forced to live in inhumane conditions and endure violence that is hard to put into words. Here, those who have been to the refugee camps in Bangladesh attempt to do so.
Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. "It was morning, I was praying with my sister. They came in, beat us, stripped us and raped us," Fatima is 15 years old, with dark eyes and a pink veil that partially covers her long black hair. "I don't know how many there were, maybe around ten," on 10 August, around a hundred Burmese nationalists and soldiers attacked Kyet Yoe Pyin, a small village in Rakhine state. "We screamed and cried. When the soldiers left us we held each other close. The neighbours dressed us again."
Read also: I rohingya saranno rimpatriati. Accordo tra Bangladesh e Myanmar
Fatima's parents died during the attack. A faint half-light fills the tent in the Kutupalong refugee camp where the girl now lives. A one-year-old nephew sleeps peacefully on a cloth laid out on the ground, while a stove heats water for tea. "I arrived on 1 September. After three days of walking through the forest, we reached the Naf river and crossed into Bangladesh," the fifteen-year-old, like some 600,000 other Rohingya refugees since October 2016, left Myanmar to reach the refugee camps set up in the Cox's Bazar district, 400 kilometres southeast of Dhaka.
Kutupalong is an immense tent city which, combined with Balukhali, is home to more than 500,000 people. The camp has progressively encroached on ever larger stretches of forest to meet the need for building materials and areas to build on. But even the figures for this tragedy are uncertain. While the official number of refugees, according to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who have arrived in Bangladesh since October 2016 is just over 600,000, the figure unofficially being cited is one million.
"They kept us for five days in a large room – Miriam is 14 years old and comes from the village of Hainda Par – There were around forty of us women. They would come in and rape us. They used us until we were spent." The girl was rounded up after yet another attack on the village, "My parents were at home when they attacked us. They fired a missile; my father and mother never came out." Miriam wandered through the forest for two days before returning to Hainda Par. There she was taken in by the few inhabitants still remaining in the village. She now lives in Kutupalong with what used to be her neighbours.
Read also: Il campo profughi di Zaatari. Dove 80mila siriani sognano di tornare a casa
The roads running through the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh all look the same. They wind narrowly, dusty and muddy, up thirty-metre ridges before plunging into small valleys where foul-smelling, polluted water collects. The tent belonging to Assima, twenty years old, sits on a rise covered by a few trees that escaped the need to source building materials. Four children play outside with a plastic bottle tied to a piece of string. A woman makes her way to one of the pumps installed by the government and NGOs to collect drinking water.
"We arrived on 29 August, Tula Tuli was our village," Assima makes herself small in the corner of the tent where she is sitting. "It wasn't the first time we had been attacked by soldiers." The area the girl comes from is one of the worst hit by attacks from soldiers and nationalists. "We heard the gunshots and the screaming, so we went outside and saw what was happening – the Rohingya refugee's brother lowers his gaze, while Assima's eyes fill with tears –, they were shooting people and then throwing them into the canals surrounding the village. They killed a four-month-old baby and threw it into a pit. The mother threw herself into the bodies to retrieve it and they killed her too."
Seized by soldiers, the women were taken to a building not far from the village. "In groups of four or five, we were raped and beaten." Once free, Assima reached her brother, gathered what little remained, and after three days of walking arrived at the border with Bangladesh.
Su Faira is also twenty years old. She wears a black niqab that leaves only her eyes uncovered as she recounts her experience. "My husband was arrested four years ago. One morning, on 24 August, soldiers came to the village and told me they would take me to get him back," but the journey did not end in a reunion — Su Faira was taken into the forest. "There were four of us women, they made us get out of the pickup truck and abused us for hours — the girl has heard nothing from her husband since, and does not even know whether he is alive or dead — then they released me. I was in pieces. After a day of walking I returned to my four-year-old daughter and my parents." The Rohingya refugee now lives in a tent in Kutupalong. "We share the space with another family. We're here now, but my daughter needs medicine and food."
Arafa lives a few hundred metres from the tent where Su Faira and her daughter stay. Past a rice field and a canal that has become an open sewer, the 15-year-old girl waits for her visitors on the threshold of "home". "It was the end of August when they arrived in the village — I don't remember the day," says Arafa, who is frightened and still in shock. "They burned the houses and we ran. There was chaos. I don't remember." The Rohingya refugee was held for two days in a cell, subjected to violence and abuse by Burmese soldiers. When she returned to the village of Pook Kul she found her parents again. She now lives with them.
"We have made doctors and psychologists available to begin a recovery process, but it is still far too little — the cases are very many and there is a deep-seated shame to overcome in the victims," says Dr Mahdi, director of field operations for the Health Management BD Foundation, an NGO that has set up shelters for Rohingya women who have suffered violence. "We operate in Balukhali — 50,000 people — but in our area alone, which is one third of the camp, we assist around 200 cases," the doctor concludes.
Read also: South Sudan, the dignity of women in the photo reportage Only a woman
Zaida is waiting for us in the madrasa, the Islamic school, set up at the entrance to the Kutupalong refugee camp. "They killed my son, then burned his body in front of my eyes," says the refugee, 21 years old, who now lives with her six-year-old daughter in a tent nearby. "They took me two days later." Zaida, who had fled Saiman Par after the first attack, was captured in another village where she had sought refuge. The soldiers took her to a facility whose name or location she does not know.
"I spent two days in a building," the girl does not speak explicitly of rape — she uses the word incident to describe the violence she suffered. "When they released me I took my daughter and made my way to the Naf River." After waiting a day on the Burmese shore, she found a boat willing to take her across. "But the owner fled, robbing us of the little we had brought with us, and leaving us at the mercy of the current for five or six hours."
At half past four in the afternoon a red sun begins to set over Kutupalong. The traffic running alongside the refugee camp grows heavier. After five o'clock, no one is allowed to remain. Volunteers and NGO members leave Kutupalong, while its inhabitants stay behind. Alone with their stories and their ghosts.
