AFP/Kutupalong, Bangladesh
As one of Myanmar’s ethnic Muslim Rohingya, 45-year-old Manjurul Islam endured a lifetime of oppression before he finally fled the country for a squalid refugee camp in Bangladesh.
Described by UN officials as one of the most persecuted minorities on earth, the Rohingya are not even recognised as citizens by the Myanmar junta. They have no legal right to own land and are forbidden from marrying or travelling without permission.
For Islam, decades of systematic discrimination came to a head six months ago, when he says his 18-year-old niece and another woman in his village were raped by soldiers.
Islam said he “foolishly” took the case to the chief of the local army camp.
“He listened and I thought we had made progress, but then they tied me and my friends up, beat us with leather belts and bamboo sticks and kicked our chests with their boots.”
Rohingyas hail from Myanmar’s Arakan state. Widespread abuse and exploitation have prompted hundreds of thousands to flee across the border to Bangladesh since the early 1990s.
Islam and his friends were released a few days later — but only after his family paid a bribe.
Then a group of soldiers destroyed their village’s shrimp farms their only source of income — forcing Islam and his neighbours to make a decision they had seen so many make before them.
“In the night, we piled into a boat and crossed the river Naf into Bangladesh,” he said.
According to Islam, more than 800 people fled his village over a two-week period in April, with some crossing into Bangladesh by boat and others walking across the forested, hilly border.
“My fifth child was born in the jungle under the open sky as we were fleeing,” said Shamsun Nahar, 32, showing her six-month old baby. “Thanks Allah that both of us survived.” But survival brought with it fresh deprivation as Nahar and Islam joined an estimated 25,000 Rohingyas living in appalling conditions in a sprawling, refugee camp.
Only 28,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh have been granted official refugee status, allowing them access to three official camps which provide basic amenities.
The rest, like Nahar, are confined to the unofficial camp in Kutuplaong in conditions which even hardened aid workers find difficult to imagine.
“There is no water or power. Barring children and pregnant women, none have access to food or medicine. When it rains it’s impossible to walk and the mud shacks became too muddy to even sleep in,” said a worker with Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger, ACF).
Following EU pressure, the Bangladeshi government has since May this year allowed ACF and another French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) limited access to the unofficial camp.
“Twenty five thousand Rohingyas are living in dire humanitarian conditions. It’s extremely disturbing,” said Paul Critchley, the MSF head of mission in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh says it is unable to cope with the continued influx of Rohingyas and the spread of the unofficial camp has stoked local tensions.
In July, police moved into the camp and destroyed several hundred makeshift dwellings in an operation condemned by MSF as “aggressive and abusive”.
Despite the squalor and alienation, many Rohingya still feel they are better off here than back in Myanmar.
“Here at this camp there are days I don’t have any food. But at least I can live freely,” said Mamun Rafiq, a Rohingya farmer who migrated three years ago.
“In Myanmar if you are a Rohingya, you are entitled to a dog’s life: They don’t even allow us to wear clean shirts or travel outside our village.”
Rights groups like the New York-based Human Rights Watch say they have gathered volumes of personal testimony to the abuses visited on the Rohingyas by the Myanmar authorities, including extra-judicial killings and forced labour
