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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/08/rohingya-refugees-myanmar-bangladesh.html
R A P H BY W I L L I A M DA N I E L S, N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C
0:15 / 0:15
By Brook Larmer
Photographs by William Daniels
PUBLISHED AUGUST 22, 2017
Since this article was published, the Myanmar military has escalated its
attacks on Rohingya villages, spurring more than hundreds of thousands
Rohingya to flee their homes as of September 11 and stream toward the
overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh. On Aug. 25, Rohingya militants
attacked security forces, killing at least a dozen. The army has responded in
brutal fashion, according to refugee accounts, burning villages and killing
hundreds.
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“Dance!” shouted the army officer, waving a gun at the trembling girl.
Afifa, just 14 years old, was corralled in a rice paddy with dozens of girls and
women—all members of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. The soldiers who
invaded her village that morning last October said they were looking for militants
who had carried out a surprise attack on three border posts, killing nine
policemen. The village’s men and boys, fearing for their lives, had dashed into the
forests to hide, and the soldiers began terrorizing the women and children.
After enduring an invasive body search, Afifa had watched soldiers drag
two young women deep into the rice paddy before they turned their attention to
her. “If you don’t dance at once,” the officer said, drawing his hand across his
throat, “we will slaughter you.” Choking back tears, Afifa began to sway back and
forth. The soldiers clapped rhythmically. A few pulled out mobile phones to shoot
videos. The commanding officer slid his arm around Afifa’s waist.
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efugees queue outside Kutupalong camp near the town of Cox’s Bazar, waiting to receive staples from the World Food P
ngladesh.
BY W I L L I A M DA N I E L S, N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C
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the feared Tatmadaw, which ruled over Myanmar for five decades before
overseeing a transition that led last year to a quasi-civilian government.
Early in the morning, family members warm themselves around a fire in an alley in
Kutupalong. Refugees construct their huts from branches, leaves, and black
plastic sheeting. Many of these flimsy shelters were ruined in May by a cyclone.
P H OTO G R A P H BY W I L L I A M DA N I E L S, N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C
What began ostensibly as a hunt for the culprits behind the border post
attacks turned into a four-month assault on the Rohingya population as a whole.
According to witnesses interviewed by the UN and international human-rights
groups, as well as National Geographic, the army campaign included executions,
mass detentions, the razing of villages, and the systematic rape of Rohingya
women. Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar,
believes it’s “very likely” the army committed crimes against humanity.
The full extent of what happened in northern Rakhine state is not yet
known because the government has not allowed independent investigators,
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journalists, or aid groups unfettered access to the affected areas. Satellite imagery
at the time showed Rohingya villages destroyed by fire. Amateur video appeared
to show charred bodies of adults and children lying on the ground in the torched
villages. Rights groups say hundreds of Rohingya have been killed. One
incontrovertible truth is that the army assault triggered the exodus of more than
75,000 Rohingya into overcrowded refugee camps across the border in
Bangladesh. Nearly 60 percent are children. (An estimated 20,000 or more
Rohingya have been displaced within Myanmar’s borders.)
Before the soldiers left Afifa’s village that day, she says they set fire to the
harvest-ready rice fields, looted houses, and shot or stole all of the cattle and
goats. The devastation and fear compelled Afifa’s parents to split the family into
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two groups and escape in different directions—to improve their odds of survival.
“We didn’t want to abandon our home,” Afifa’s father, Mohammed Islam, told me
five months later, when five of the family’s 11 members staggered into Balukhali,
a refugee camp in Bangladesh. “But the army has only one aim: to get rid of all
Rohingya.”
It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. More than a year ago, Nobel Peace
Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi became Myanmar’s de facto leader, and
international human-rights groups—as well as many Rohingya—hoped she would
help move Rakhine toward peace and reconciliation. The daughter of Myanmar’s
independence hero and martyr, General Aung San, she is celebrated for her
fearless resistance to the country’s military dictatorship. After enduring more than
15 years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League of
Democracy to a sweeping electoral victory in 2015. (A clause in the military-
drafted constitution prevented her from becoming president, so a loyal underling
serves as president while she runs the government as “state counselor.”)
“We had a very big hope that Suu Kyi and democracy would be good for
us,” says Moulabi Jaffar, a 40-year-old Islamic cleric and shop owner from a
village north of Maungdaw, sitting in his shack in Balukhali camp. “But the
violence only got worse. That came as a big surprise.”
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Men pray at a mosque being built from bamboo at Balukhali, a refugee camp in
Bangladesh. The Rohingya are Muslims, while Buddhism is the dominant religion
in Myanmar. Buddhist firebrands have stirred up hatred for the minority Rohingya.
P H OTO G R A P H BY W I L L I A M DA N I E L S, N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C
Despite her reputation as a human-rights icon, Aung San Suu Kyi has
seemed unwilling or unable to speak about the violence against the Rohingya,
much less bring perpetrators to justice. When reports of army atrocities emerged
late last year, she broke her silence—not to rein in abusive soldiers but to scold
the United Nations and human-rights groups for stoking “bigger fires of
resentment” by dwelling on the testimonies of Rohingya who had fled to
Bangladesh. It doesn’t help, she said, “if everybody is just concentrating on the
negative side of the situation.” Aung San Suu Kyi has yet to visit northern
Rakhine. But in a BBC interview in April, she said, “I don’t think there is ethnic
cleansing going on.”
Aung San Suu Kyi remains an immensely popular figure in Myanmar,
where 90 percent of the population is Buddhist and the military still wields
enormous power. But her role in shielding the army from scrutiny in Rakhine has
tarnished her global reputation, even prompting a letter from 13 Nobel laureates
upbraiding her for failing to protect the rights of the Rohingya. “Like many in the
international community, we expected more of Suu Kyi,” says Matthew Smith,
co-founder of Fortify Rights, a Bangkok-based human-rights group. “She is
operating in a delicate situation politically, but that doesn’t justify silence or
wholesale denials in the face of mountains of evidence. The army launched an
attack on a civilian population, and nobody has been held accountable.”
Myanmar set up three commissions to look into the turmoil in Rakhine
state, but none is independent. The army’s report, released in May, proclaimed its
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Young boys study the Quran inside a madrassa in one of the older parts of the
Kutupalong camp. Most Rohingya children in Bangladesh do not have access to
formal schooling because they are unregistered refugees. Most attend the many
madrassas found throughout the camps.
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rom Shaplapur village, who work for local fishermen, shove a boat to sea, where some will spend the night. Right:
0 years. She lives in Kutupalong refugee camp with four children and her husband, who has been unable to find work.
BY W I L L I A M DA N I E L S, N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C
The refugee camps that line Bangladesh’s border are a short drive from
the Bangladeshi resort of Cox’s Bazar. Tourists there cavort on the wide beach,
taking grinning selfies in the surf, while a few miles away, hundreds of thousands
of refugees marinate in grief and neglect. In Kutupalong, a sprawling camp with
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some 30,000 Rohingya refugees, the wood and bamboo dwellings radiate from the
center like rings on a tree, each layer marking a wave of violence the Rohingya
have fled.
Rozina Akhtar, 22, has lived here since she was seven years old. With no
real hope of leaving—“we have no passports, no ID cards, so what can we do?”—
she tries to help new arrivals adjust to their lives as refugees. “We can’t reject
them,” she says. “These are our sisters and brothers.” Akhtar helps newcomers get
medical care, plastic tarpaulins, and food rations, but what they really need are
jobs. Men can occasionally get day jobs, fishing, harvesting rice, or laboring in
the salt flats for a dollar or two a day, but many of the women beg for money
along the road outside the camp.
Under a sprawling fig tree in Kutupalong, new arrivals gather to talk
about the atrocities they endured in Myanmar. Nur Ayesha, 40, pulls back her
headscarf to reveal bleached-white burn scars across her forehead; soldiers set fire
to her house while she was still inside, she says. Residents of Kyet Yoe Pyin say
the Burmese soldiers who firebombed their houses also gunned down six women
and a man who had stayed behind to attend the birth of a baby—the mother
included.
Minara, an 18-year-old in a black burqa, speaks about her missing family
members before revealing that Burmese soldiers gang-raped her and several other
young women in her village. Her voice barely rises above a whisper. As we talk,
Minara, who, like many victims, didn’t choose to reveal her last name, bites the
edge of her sleeve, pulling it over her face. By the end, only her eyes, darting
back and forth, are visible. “We’re too scared to go back,” she says.
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a says she was burned on her face and arm when the Burmese military torched her house while she was in it. She has re
Kutupalong, was shot by soldiers multiple times in his arm, which had to be amputated when he finally found a doctor.
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Molia Banu, 60, arrived at Kutupalong about two months before this photograph.
She and her daughters fled when the military began burning a house next to
theirs. Still suffering from an operation to remove a tumor, Banu supports her
family by begging on the main road.
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Bangladesh. That strategy hasn’t worked, but it means that there are close to half
a million undocumented Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh with no right or access
to employment, education, or basic health care.
Toward the end of day, a boy walks along a path past houses in through a more
established section of Kutupalong camp toward a playground that attracts many
children.
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rape victim I spoke to recalled the chilling words of her army attacker: “He kept
saying, ‘This kind of torture will continue until you leave the country.’”
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refugee camps without any way to make a living. The mixture of despair and
marginalization, experts warn, is a recipe for radicalization. Many refugees seek
solace in religious faith. In the camps, clusters of young men armed with holy
Korans go door to door, urging refugees to pray more devoutly. Out of sight,
locals say, is something more ominous: A newly formed militant group, the
Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, is reportedly trying to recruit refugees to join a
nascent insurgency against the Burmese army and its local government
collaborators.
The last time I saw Afifa, she was sweeping a rectangular patch of dirt on
a hill near the refugee camp’s edge—the site of the family’s new shelter. Her
father had borrowed $30 from a fellow refugee to buy a horse-cart full of bamboo
poles and strips, and he’d already erected the thickest poles at the corners. Islam,
a former Arabic teacher, was dressed in a white skullcap and a clean cream-
colored tunic, getting ready to attend midday Friday prayers—the jumu’ah—for
the first time since he left his village five months before.
Just down the sandy path from their plot, barefoot men in sarongs
scrambled to secure the bamboo scaffolding of Balukhali’s new mosque. It would
be another week before the structure was finished, with palm fronds as the roof,
but the muezzin sounded the call to prayer and dozens of bearded men in white
caps gravitated to a small carpet in the center of the mosque. Islam found a spot in
the first row and bowed in front of the imam, who stood on a red plastic stool.
Later, as Islam walked back from the mosque, he smiled: “I feel better now.”
The misery, however, has continued. In late May, a cyclone ripped through
southern Bangladesh, destroying the family’s shelter and thousands of others in
the camps. Nobody died in Balukhali, and Afifa’s mother and other siblings have
since made it to Bangladesh, easing the girl’s anxiety. Still, food remains scarce,
the monsoon rains continue, and there are troubling reports of renewed violence
in Rakhine from both sides—military operations by the Burmese army and
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