Hamida Begum fled her home in Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh about two months ago with her husband, two-year-old son and three-month-old baby. In the weeks before she left, her husband almost never slept at home out of fear of being arrested.
“He would climb on top of a tree and sit there the whole night, even if it was raining really hard,” the 18-year-old said, wearing a yellow headscarf over a purple dress and sitting on the floor of her barren bamboo hut.
Hamida now lives on the edge of the world’s largest refugee camp, one of the latest arrivals among about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who have escaped a Burmese army crackdown that the UN has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Although Myanmar has said it is ready to take back the Rohingya, the continued outflow of refugees such as Hamida and her family underlines the lack of progress in addressing the crisis a year on from the start of the offensive on Aug. 25 last year.
The Rohingya exodus has threatened Myanmar’s tense transition to democracy and shattered the image of its leader, Burmese State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, outside of the country.
“The crisis has done enormous damage to Myanmar’s standing in the world,” said Richard Horsey, a former UN diplomat in the country and a political analyst.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s government has rejected most allegations of atrocities made against the security forces by refugees. It has built transit centers to receive Rohingya returning to western Rakhine State.
However, stories brought by Hamida and other recent arrivals in Bangladesh — at least 150 people this month and nearly 13,000 since the beginning of the year — suggest that the resolution of a crisis that enters its second year today remains distant.
About a half-dozen new refugees who spoke to reporters said that, after months of struggle amid charred huts and empty villages, they were forced to abandon their homes out of fear of harassment or arrest by the security forces.
They said they had been confined to their homes and pushed to the brink of starvation, unable to visit farms for work, markets and fishing ponds for food, or mosques to pray.
Myanmar has said it did not provoke the crisis and its military launched a legitimate counterinsurgency operation in response to a violent campaign from within the Rohingya minority, who are mostly denied citizenship in the southeast Asian nation.
“It was a systematic activity by a group in order to get citizenship for Bengali people,” said Myo Nyunt, a spokesman for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party.
Many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar refer to the Rohingya as “Bengali,” which most in the Muslim minority regard as a derogatory term used to suggest they are interlopers from Bangladesh.
The massive influx of refugees has transformed the hills in southeastern Bangladesh into an endless sea of white, orange and blue tents. Residents are settling in for the long haul.
Near Hamida’s hut, Rohingya men carry bricks, dig 4m-deep latrines, reinforce muddy slopes with sturdy soil and mend fences for a new school run by a non-governmental organization. Bits of wood, bamboo poles and tarpaulin sheets are spread across the area where many of the new arrivals are sent to build their shelters.
Hamida said about 5,000 Rohingya lived in her village in northern Rakhine until August last year.
When she fled about two months ago, she said she was among only 100 or so who had remained in the partly-burned hamlet.
Reporters were unable to independently verify Hamida’s account, although relatives and neighbors present at the interview supported her version of events and offered additional details.
Hamida said she stayed because she could not afford to pay her way into Bangladesh.
Months after the initial offensive, the security forces frequently patrolled her village and sometimes arrested Rohingya men or grabbed them to do unpaid work at an expanding military camp nearby, she said.
“In Myanmar, if my children start crying at night, I can’t even light a candle, because there is a complete blackout, and if the military see any light they come and arrest you,” Hamida said.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) last week said in a report that more than half of the new arrivals “reported that relatives remaining in Myanmar also plan to leave due to continued fears.”
“People tell us ... they told me, that they feel like they’re prisoners. They can’t leave the house, the men can’t go fishing; the curfew is so extreme that there are only certain hours when you can light a fire,” said Caroline Gluck, a UNHCR representative in the camps.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s spokesman did not respond to repeated calls seeking comment.
In a speech in Singapore on Tuesday, Myanmar’s civilian leader said the country had made preparations for the repatriation of refugees, but that it was difficult to set a timeframe for when that might happen.
“The returnees have to be sent back by Bangladesh,” Aung San Suu Kyi said. “We can only welcome them at the border.”
Myo Nyunt acknowledged that the ethnic and religious tensions that triggered the violence in Rakhine a year ago remained stark.
“The situation in the area hasn’t changed within one year,” he said. “It will take time to be improved, live in harmony.”
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