Rohingya women are still crying out for justice as their babies are being ripped from their arms and killed

METERO
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan
10 Mar 2019

‘In October 2018, I returned to the camps with international development charity Christian Aid’ (Photo: Kate Forbes)

I have visited the Rohingya refugee camps on the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar twice in my capacity as a doctor. As the crisis broke in 2017, I met refugees crossing the border and saw the most brutal injuries. Content warning: this piece contains graphic descriptions of violence Mothers told me devastating accounts of having their babies ripped from their arms and murdered with the same knives used to slice off their own breasts.



There are sprawling camps housing almost one million Rohingya – the scale has to be seen to be believed. A generation of children born out of rape, women who have been brutally violated and men who have carried their families for 15 days, without food, escaping genocide with just the shirts on their backs. In October 2018, I returned to the camps with international development charity Christian Aid and heard how, despite the uncertainty surrounding their futures, people felt relief at finally being able to sleep at night. I spoke with Humaira, whose young son was murdered when the army stormed her village. She told me of how she wanted to take her own life but was kept alive by her desire to locate her son’s body and bury him.

‘There are sprawling camps housing almost one million Rohingya – the scale has to be seen to be believed’ (Photo: Paddy Dowling/DEC)

After two painstaking days of searching, and at risk of being caught by the military, she eventually decided to escape. She still lives with the pain of not being able to bury her son. I then met Subara, who told me of the day the Myanmar military snatched her one-year-old son from her arms and knifed him to death in front of her eyes. I was in a room of thirty women, all of whom had similar heart-wrenching stories to tell. The guilt of coming home to my own three year old and five year old left me unable to sleep at night. Why should their lives be of more value to the world than those of the Rohingya children, brutally slaughtered and left without a dignified burial? While working in the clinics, I saw children with symptoms of malnourishment and dehydration. I met women arriving with skin conditions and infections, too scared to use the washrooms at night, with no privacy for them to do so in the day.

‘Why is it that women in one corner of the world are not valued the same as in another?’ (Photo: Kate Forbes) 

Despite the clinics placing screens outside the slats in the walls that allow air to circulate the humid conditions, men and teenagers attempt to peer in – even here, privacy cannot be guaranteed. Across the clinics I visited, doctors told me that they have been treating women who have given birth to children who were the result of rape and were forced to make the difficult decision on whether to keep their babies or not. There were stories of women dying from major blood loss after attempting a DIY abortion at home, as they could not face the constant reminder of the trauma they experienced. Other doctors told me of finding babies left abandoned because their mothers could not face raising a child that risked being rejected by the community for being a product of rape. Women are suffering with severe mental health issues following their harrowing experiences, and with many of them now birthing children who are the product of violent rape, they also face huge personal stigma within their society. I was pleased to see on my most recent visit that psycho-social support is on offer from a plethora of organisations, and that new mother and baby safe spaces have been created to allow for breastfeeding in privacy.

Link:https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/10/rohingya-women-are-still-crying-out-for-justice-as-their-babies-are-being-ripped-from-their-arms-and-killed-8856319/