For Rohingya women, nowhere is safe

“My village was under a genocidal attack. We had no escape but to run to Bangladesh.” Anika*, 29, recalled how she had fled her home—located in Buthidaung Township’s Taung Bazar village in northern Rakhine State—along with her husband and daughter in 2017, escaping the lethal, targeted violence of a “clearing operation” that the Myanmar military carried out on August 25. She remembered how the army troops had entered the village, arresting at least 50 people on suspicion of links to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the Rohingya armed group that had claimed responsibility for attacks on police outposts in the township. The military’s response, inflicted indiscriminately on entire Rohingya communities, was brutal. They committed arson attacks, raped, and killed, forcing more than 700,000—possibly closer to a million—Rohingya people to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. These actions ultimately resulted in Myanmar officials facing as yet untried genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. For her part, Anika joined hundreds of thousands of others fleeing the targeted violence. Trekking for eight days through inhospitable mountains with little food and insufficient water, she had no choice but to drink the dirty groundwater she found by the roadside. More than one million Rohingya refugees are now living in camps in Bangladesh. They have no freedom of movement and no access to an adequate education or livelihood, relying on meagre donations from international aid agencies. They stay mostly in improvised shelters made of plastic and whatever materials can be found in the sprawling camps, sharing public toilets and facilities for bathing with other residents. In recent years, security issues in the camps have worsened, with a rising trend of reported extortion and abductions by armed, self-styled militias, called “gangsters” by some camp residents, especially the ARSA, the Rohingya Salvation Organization (RSO) and the Arakan Rohingya Army (ARA). Besides the reported abductions of young adult males by the militias for ransom or forced military service back in Myanmar, Rohingya women and girls have said they were facing an even greater danger of daily harassment, sexual assault, and abduction for sex trafficking. According to a United Nations (UN) report from this year, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees are currently staying in camps in the district of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. A deteriorating security situation in the camps, aggravated by the insufficiency of humanitarian aid, has aggravated the myriad risks to the residents’ safety—especially women’s—including the danger of trafficking for purposes of sexual exploitation, the report said. Rohingya people in a refugee camp in Bangladesh (Photo: Mohammed Zonaid) Running without escaping Living in refugee camps for seven years after fleeing Myanmar, Anika was able to find work for a time before she had to flee again. Along with her husband and two children, Anika was forced to flee after the ARSA threatened to kill her for working as a teacher. She said after working for a while she started receiving threats from different militia groups in the camps, who said Muslim women should not be allowed to take jobs with nongovernmental organisations or even leave their homes each day for work. Anika showed a letter dated October 8 to Myanmar Now, which she had written to a UN agency in Cox’s Bazar, appealing for help and protection from the criminal groups in the camp. The letter recounts how one day in early September, Anika was at home doing chores without her husband, when a group of men she believed to be members of the RSO came into the camp without permission. “They forced their way into my shelter and tried to wrong me,” she said, meaning they attempted sexual assault. “I’ve been living a life of horror, day and night. I’ve been threatened and tortured by the ARSA criminals,” Anika wrote in her letter. Most Rohingya women who have taken teaching jobs face verbal harassment every day, including insulting comments on their clothing and makeup, threats, and other such abuse. They are harassed for working outside their homes, Anika said, adding that the percentage of Rohingya teachers in the camps who are women has dropped from 30 to 10. “I, too, had to quit my teaching job,” she told Myanmar Now in July. “The situation gets worse by the day. People are killed, kidnapped, and robbed nearly every day,” she said. Anika added that the security staff from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has come to interview her, but she has yet to receive any substantive help to defray her cost of living, which is twice what it was in the camp. “Now I’m just waiting for their call, living outside the camp,” she said, adding, “We don’t have support from local police and the Bangladeshi government… Women don’t receive enough legal support.” “There are many others around the camps who are facing similar problems,” she continued. “The world doesn’t know about this because almost everyone stays silent. If anyone raises this, they only face more danger and risk losing their dignity.” This year in June and August, a new wave of tens of thousands of Rohingya fled their homes to escape violence in northern Rakhine State, where the Rakhine ethnic armed organisation Arakan Army (AA) has been fighting the Myanmar military for control of the state for more than a year. The AA, accused of raping Rohingya women and targeting Rohingya civilians, has now taken control of more than half the townships in the state from the Myanmar military, and is continuing to fight for full control. Children in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh (Photo: Mohammed Zonaid) Online harassment turns to real-world danger Shida* fled her home in 2017, when she was in sixth grade, travelling with her family to the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar district. She said she has had the opportunity to study in the camp, where she worked initially as a teacher and later as a translator from Rohingya to Bengali to help patients communicate with doctors. Travelling to work always comes with the risk of verbal harassment on the road, she said, adding to the online harassment she has come to expect every day. “A lot of strangers have texted me on WhatsApp,” she said, “And also called me… I don't know where they got my phone number from.” For Shida, the only way to handle online harassment is to adhere strictly to her own rule: “No response, block them.” Her blocklist has now grown to some 200 phone numbers, she said, many with a Malaysian country code. One day, after months of these unwanted messages, Shida recalled that she started receiving photos of herself from an unknown number, accompanied by unambiguous threats. She went to her brother-in-law, who called the number to confront the sender. Just a few days later, on July 11 of this year, a group of armed men with guns came to her camp shelter at around 7pm, apparently intending to abduct her. “Luckily, I was visiting my brother-in-law at the time, so they didn’t catch me at home,” she said. However, the armed men were irate at finding Shida gone, rampaging through her family’s shelter and even forcing their guns into her mother’s mouth, holding the rest of the family at gunpoint as they searched for her. They would not relent, even searching several neighbouring shelters before finally accepting her family’s explanation that she was visiting relatives outside the camps. “I think Allah wanted to save me from those evil hands,” Shida said. “I’m still concerned for my safety. I can’t go back home or back to work because they’re still on the hunt for me,” she told Myanmar Now. Rohingya people pray in a refugee camp in Bangladesh (Photo: Mohammed Zonaid) Risking life for dignity Cho Ma Win*, fled to Bangladesh when she was in ninth grade, but ultimately had to seek refuge in Malaysia because of the threats she faced in her Bangladeshi camp. When Cho Ma arrived in the camp in 2017, she was hoping to continue her education, but soon found that educational opportunities were scarce and ultimately settled for a teaching job at a school for refugees funded by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). As she walked to the school each day, a man she had never met before disturbed and harassed her, saying he wanted to marry her. He not only harassed her incessantly, but even started telling her students the same thing, she said. “His name was Mohammed Sadek,” she remembered. “As I continued to ignore him, his behaviour got more serious. One day I got a call and it turned out to be from him.” Cho Ma’s family, alarmed by Sadek’s erratic behaviour and constant harassment, began making arrangements for her to marry another man who worked for a nongovernmental organisation, she said. According to Cho Ma, her harasser later turned out to be a member of the ARSA, which had been carrying out abductions in the camps, holding young men for ransom then sending them back to Myanmar to fight on the frontlines in Rakhine State if their families were unable to pay. As her parents were trying to arrange her marriage, the man threatened them, saying he would kill her husband-to-be and claiming he had been in a previous sexual relationship with her. “The reality was that he never even got to talk to me,” Cho Ma said, adding that the ordeal dragged on for months. “I had to resign from my job because he tried to kidnap me,” she added. With the situation spiralling out of control, Cho Ma’s family continued trying to send her to Malaysia to marry another man she had never met before. However, she encountered no end of obstacles in trying to reach the other country: She had difficulty obtaining a passport, had to travel to India while evading police because of her undocumented status, fell victim to mugging and sexual assault on the way, and nearly drowned on a boat in the Bay of Bengal. After months of fresh hindrances and dangers, she finally arrived in Malaysia in 2019. The marriage her family had arranged went ahead, she said, and she now had a son with her new husband. Cho Ma’s experiences were not unique, she said. Many young women and girls in the refugee camps suffer every day through harassment and sexual assault, with the Bangladeshi government and UN agencies giving little or no attention to their plight.Reports have even emerged of rape perpetrated by local, Bangladeshi police in the camps. “My message to the world is that there are a lot of young girls who are going through these kinds of difficulties. You should support these girls,” Cho Ma said. “Those gangsters should not be allowed to touch or harass girls and women,” she added. With the dangers of harassment and sexual violence mounting in the camps and no protections of personal safety or legal support, Anika said, Rohingya girls and women have no escape but the usually perilous journey by boat to Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia. Each year, hundreds of Rohingya die on the sea, usually while travelling to Malaysia and Indonesia in hopes of finally finding protection and safety. “A lot of young girls are taking risks and opting for dangerous boat journeys because of the same problems I had,” Cho Ma said. “There must be legal action.” Rohingya woman in a refugee camp in Bangladesh (Photo: Mohammed Zonaid) Harassed and abducted for activism Another victim of the violent armed groups in the camps was Cho Cho*, 25, a Rohingya activist working in the sphere of education and development. She said a Rohingya armed group threatened then kidnapped her for her work. “I, along with a female colleague, was kidnapped for five hours back in 2022,” she said. Ever since, she has lived outside of the camp but has continued to work for women’s education and empowerment. “They have threatened me many times since, but I am not giving up because I am working on this for my community,” she said. Like the other women who spoke with Myanmar Now, Cho Cho expressed frustration over the lack of support from Bangladeshi authorities and UN agencies on the threats to Rohingya women in the camps. Rohingya people have been living in the camps for eight years, with few signs of improvement but the incidence of killings, extortion, abduction, harassment, and rape now on the rise, said Cho Cho. “As we face a myriad of problems, why is the world still keeping silent? It’s very frustrating for us,” she said. According to Anika, “When we were in Myanmar, we couldn’t live a peaceful life because we were Rohingya.” Now, she said, “We sought refuge here for our safety, but even here we are not safe.” “I just want to live a peaceful life with my children and husband, like others around the world,” Anika said. Myanmar Now was unable to reach the accused Rohingya militias for comment on the allegations of harassment, extortion, abductions, sexual assault, and other violence. *Names in this article have been changed to protect our sources’ security

For Rohingya women, nowhere is safe

Having fled for their lives, mostly from what the United Nations (UN) called a ‘textbook’ example of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar’s Rakhine State eight years ago, Rohingya women have become the most vulnerable victims of intensifying violence in Bangladeshi refugee camps

Subscribe for full access

Her parents gone, a Myanmar student prays for the return of a father lost in conflict

Rakhine State floods put AA administration to its biggest test yet

When the people are the enemy: Why Myanmar’s resistance is not giving up

After 100 days of ‘civilian’ rule, Myanmar remains a bastion of oppression

Subscribe for full access

Related Articles

Investment, energy sector talks to dominate Myanmar junta leader’s visit to Thailand

Wa delegation holds talks with Myanmar junta as analysts see possible political concessions

Imprisoned NLD member’s health worsens after regime denies breast cancer treatment for almost one year

Fighting intensifies as Myanmar junta pushes into former DKBA territory near Myawaddy