By Kristen Gelineau

UKHIYA, Bangladesh — Tucked away in the shadows of her family’s bamboo shelter, the girl hid from the world.

She was 13, and she was petrified. Two months earlier, soldiers had broken into her home back in Myanmar and raped her, an attack that drove her and her terrified family over the border to Bangladesh. Ever since, she had waited for her period to arrive. Gradually, she came to realize that it would not.

For the girl, a Rohingya Muslim who agreed to be identified by her first initial, A, the pregnancy was a prison she was desperate to escape. The rape itself had destroyed her innocence. But carrying the baby of a Buddhist soldier could destroy her life.

More than 10 months have passed since Myanmar’s security forces launched a sweeping campaign of rape and other brutalities against the Rohingya, and the babies conceived during those assaults have been born. For many of their mothers, the births have been tinged with fear — not only because the infants are reminders of the horrors they survived, but because their community often views rape as shameful, and bearing a baby conceived by Buddhists as sacrilege.

More than 10 months have passed since Myanmar’s security forces launched a sweeping campaign of rape and other brutalities against the Rohingya, and the babies conceived during those assaults have been born. (July 5)

Theirs is a misery spoken of only in murmurs. Some ended their pregnancies early by taking cheap abortion pills available throughout the camps. Others gave birth to unloved babies; some agonized over whether to give them away. One woman was so worried about her neighbors discovering her pregnancy that she suffered silently through labor in her shelter, stuffing a scarf in her mouth to swallow her screams.

In Bangladesh’s overcrowded refugee camps where shelter walls are made of hole-pocked plastic and sounds travel easily across the tree-stripped hills, A knew that hiding her pregnancy would be difficult and hiding a wailing newborn impossible.

She worried that giving birth to this child would leave her so tainted that no man would ever want her as his wife. In a panic, she told her mother, who swiftly took her to a clinic for an abortion. But A was so frightened by the doctor’s description of possible side effects that she thought she would die.

And so she retreated to her shelter, where she tried to flatten her growing belly by wrapping it in tight layers of scarves. She hid there for months, emerging only to use the latrine a few meters away.

There was nothing to do but wait with dread for the baby who symbolized the pain of an entire people to arrive.

___

For the women who became pregnant during last year’s wave of attacks in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, to speak the truth is to risk losing everything. Because of that, no one knows how many rape survivors have given birth. But given the vastness of the sexual violence, relief groups had braced for the worst: a spike in deliveries from traumatized women, and scores of babies left abandoned in the camps that are home to around 900,000 Rohingya refugees.

By June, though, the birth rate in medical clinics had remained relatively steady, and only a handful of babies have been found left behind. Aid workers began to suspect that many women had quietly dealt with their pregnancies themselves.

“They will not come forward for antenatal checkups — they will try to hide their pregnancy,” says Medecins Sans Frontieres midwife Daniela Cassio, a sexual violence specialist. “I’m sure many have also died during the pregnancy or during the delivery.”

Yet sprinkled throughout the sprawling camps, you will find women who have grown weary of the silence. Ten such women and girls agreed to interviews with The Associated Press. They consented to be identified in this story by their first initials only, citing fear of retaliation from Myanmar’s military.

The monsoon rains thundering down on the roof of A’s shelter threaten to drown out her words. Her voice still has a childlike softness, and when she speaks of the soldiers who raped her, it fades to a whisper.

Already, several men who had shown interest in marrying her have walked away when they’ve learned about the attack. Her parents worry no man will ever want her. And yet, with their blessing, she leans in close to share her story.

“I want justice,” she says, anxiously turning a plastic cup over and over in her hands. “That’s why I’m talking to you.”

___

To understand the fear that drove some of these women underground, enter the stifling shelter where M lives.

She sits on a mat, sweating and scratching at the angry scar on her breast left by the soldier who bit her. The baby who was the product of that attack wails in his 8-year-old sister’s arms. The little girl tries to hand the infant off to her mother, but M dismisses them both with a wave of her hand.

“I don’t want to carry him anymore,” M says. “I don’t love him.” And so the girl gently places the screaming infant into a hammock crafted out of a rice sack and twine.

M’s husband is not home to help. He rarely is, she says. Ever since she told him of her rape and pregnancy, he has wanted little to do with her.

Her nightmare began the way it did for so many Rohingya women: With scores of soldiers swarming her village in August, shortly after Rohingya insurgents attacked several police posts. The details of her assault follow a pattern documented last year in an investigation by the AP. That investigation, based on interviews with 29 rape survivors, an examination of medical records and testimony from doctors, concluded the rapes of Rohingya women were sweeping and methodical.

From inside her house, M heard a rattle of gunfire and a chorus of screams. She looked outside and saw soldiers setting fire to homes. Her two daughters fled, but by the time M made it out the door with her 2-year-old son, six soldiers were waiting. One snatched the wailing boy from her arms, strangled him, and threw his lifeless body to the ground.

The soldiers forced her back into the house. When she saw them undoing their pants, she pressed her hands over her eyes. They stomped on her stomach and feet, and one after another they raped her. She felt like she was dying.

Two days passed before her husband found her and carried her to the mountains, and then across the border to Bangladesh. He asked her if the soldiers had raped her. Too ashamed to tell him the truth, she said they had only beaten her.

After two months, her period still hadn’t arrived. She felt dizzy and nauseous, and craved sour foods like tamarind, just as she had with her other pregnancies.

Terrified of how her husband would react, she said nothing. Another two months passed and she began to feel movements deep inside her. She knew she couldn’t hide the pregnancy much longer.

One night, she was too sick to make him rice for dinner. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

The truth spilled out: “I was raped by six soldiers. And I’m pregnant.”

Her husband offered no comfort, only blame. He demanded to know why she hadn’t run away from the soldiers. He told her he could never have sex with her again. And then he asked if he could marry another woman.

“You are useless to me,” he said.

M pleaded with him not to leave her, told him she needed help with their girls. And so he stayed, though he treated her like she was invisible. At night, she curled up in the corner of their shelter with her daughters; he slept along an adjacent wall.

“M” who says that her life is meaningless, sits in her shelter. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

With her other pregnancies, she excitedly counted the days until delivery. With this baby, she paid no attention to her due date. She felt detached from the life growing inside her.

Her contractions began late one night. She labored quietly for hours, until her screams awakened her husband. She told him to find a local birthing assistant to help her. He did, and then left.

When the infant finally arrived, he looked nothing like her other children. In his eyes, she saw her rapists. To look at him was to relive her attack, over and over again.

Her husband returned hours after the birth. He said nothing to her, and ignored the baby. He wouldn’t help her clean up the mat she’d given birth on, and she was in too much pain to clean it herself. She lay on it for days, until one of her daughters came to her aid.

The baby’s cries just made her angry. She found herself crying all the time, too.

Before the rape, her husband was loving and kind. Now, he leaves their shelter early in the morning and doesn’t return until midnight. He is often irritable and impatient with her. He has never kissed the boy, or cuddled him.

“M” sits in her shelter, uninterested in her baby boy who had awoken from his sleep. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

She didn’t bother to name the child until a community leader told her to. She chose the first name that popped into her mind. It means nothing to her, she says. And neither does the boy.

She doesn’t want to give him to a foster family. Her only other son was killed in the attack. So she takes care of this new boy in the hopes that one day, he will take care of her.

For now, she pretends to love him. After all, she says, he is just a baby. This is not his fault.

Nor is it hers, though she still berates herself for the rape. She questions her decision not to run from the house sooner, though running faster probably would not have saved her.

She spends much of her days lying on a mat, praying for Allah to end her life.

“I don’t have any money to buy anything. I am always depressed. My husband doesn’t love me. I want to die as soon as possible,” she says, weeping.

“My life is meaningless.”

“M” lays on the floor of her shelter, uninterested in her baby boy who had awoken from his sleep. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

___

For some rape survivors, the idea of giving birth to a child conceived by someone other than a Muslim felt like a fate worse than death. So they turned to clinics and makeshift pharmacies set up in the camps for abortion drugs they hoped could end their agony.

The pain of D’s rape was so severe that she had to wrap a supportive scarf around her battered pelvis to endure the dayslong walk to Bangladesh. Yet through it all, she survived. When she discovered she was pregnant, she wished she had not.

She was a widow, and to give birth to a child without a husband was to invite admonishment. She quickly sought out a pharmacy to find the drugs that would induce an abortion.

As she swallowed the first tablet, she cried and prayed to Allah. But nothing happened. So she bought more medicine, taking pill after pill until, at last, her stomach twisted with intense cramps and heavy blood began to flow. Her relief was instant.

“I felt that I had found a new world,” she says. “I would have taken poison if I had to give birth to that baby because it is a big shame for me. People would criticize me.”

Others, though, found surprising support. So certain was T that her husband would divorce her, that she waited a month to tell him about her pregnancy. Her heart hammered the day she revealed the truth. When she did, her husband began to cry, and so did she.

“It’s not your fault,” he reassured her. “Maybe it was your fate that this happened to you. You didn’t want this.”

She had no idea she could go to a hospital for an abortion. But one day, she met an aid worker who was walking through the camps looking for pregnant women in distress. The aid worker provided her with abortion drugs. T took the pills, then visited a religious leader who performed a ceremony that he said would remove the baby. When she began to bleed, she felt as if a dirtiness inside her had been washed clean.

Slowly, a few women have forgiven themselves, though there was never anything to forgive. H, who also had an abortion, was once so ashamed of her pregnancy that she told no one. Now, though, she has begun to share her story with others, and has focused her fury on the men who brutalized her. She did nothing to invite their violence, she says. So why should she feel ashamed?

In Myanmar, where the Rohingya people have few rights and Rohingya women even less, she had no voice. Here, she says, she feels she can finally speak.

“I don’t want to hide anymore,” she says.

____

“A,” a 13-year old Rohingya Muslim girl adjusts her headscarf in her family’s shelter. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

The moment that A had long feared arrived one day in May. After months of isolation, her contractions had finally begun.

She was still a child herself, overwhelmed with uncertainty over what to expect. And she cringed at the thought of what others would say.

For hours, she labored on the floor of her shelter, her mother and grandmother by her side, until at last, she pushed out a baby girl.

She looked down at the infant and began to shake. She felt like she was going into shock.

The baby was fat and strong, with a round face and small eyes. As A gazed at her child, she saw beauty. But she also saw pain.

She knew she could not keep the girl.

Her father hurried to a clinic run by a relief group and asked them to take the baby away. An hour after A gave birth, an aid worker arrived to retrieve the infant.

She held her daughter in her arms and began to cry. She kissed her head and her tiny hands. And then she handed the baby over.

She doesn’t know who is caring for her baby now, but groups like Save the Children and UNICEF have found Rohingya families within the camps who are willing to take in such children. The organizations have placed around ten babies with new families, says Krissie Hayes, a child protection in emergencies specialist with UNICEF.

For now, A tries to imagine what her future will be like. She hopes someone will marry her one day, and give her more babies. She hopes for a sewing machine, so she can earn money mending clothes.

Sometimes, she says, an aid worker stops by the shelter to show her photos of her daughter, so she can see that she is safe and well.

“Even though I got this baby from the Buddhists, I love her,” she says. “Because I carried her for nine months.”

For her, giving the baby away was the right decision. It was the only decision.

But she aches for her still.

By Associated Press

June 11, 2018

BANGKOK — A U.S. government-affiliated broadcaster that provides news to countries in Asia where freedom of information is restricted is losing its local partner in Myanmar after refusing demands that it stop using the term “Rohingya” to describe an oppressed Muslim minority.

Monday was the last day that the DVB Media Group’s network would carry its television broadcasts, said Radio Free Asia spokesman Rohit Mahajan. He said RFA told Myanmar authorities that it was unwilling to bow to their pressure to use a term other than Rohingya.

About 700,000 Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh since the government launched a violent counterinsurgency campaign last August in western Myanmar, where most live. Many people in Myanmar call the Rohingya “Bengali” to reflect their contention that they are illegal migrants from Bangladesh rather than natives.

The government refuses to recognize the Rohingya as an official ethnic minority and denies most the right to citizenship and its privileges.

Myanmar is the second Southeast Asian nation in 10 months where RFA has lost access to local broadcasters. Cambodia last August prohibited local FM stations from carrying RFA programming, one of several actions restricting the media in what was seen as a move to silence critical voices ahead of a general election this July.

Mahajan said RFA had been broadcasting on DVB’s channel since early October last year. A May 7 memo about DVB’s case from the government broadcasting agency Myanma Radio and Television to private broadcasters said the direct use of the “controversial word ‘Rohingya’” was a violation of contractual codes to which broadcasters are bound.

A statement by RFA President Libby Liu provided Monday to The Associated Press declared that the U.S. broadcaster “will not compromise its code of journalistic ethics, which prohibits the use of slurs against ethnic minority groups. RFA will continue to refer to the Rohingya as the ‘Rohingya’ in our reports. Use of other terms, even those that fall short of being derogatory, would be inaccurate and disingenuous to both our product and our audience.”

“By forbidding the use of the word ‘Rohingya,’ Myanmar’s government is taking an Orwellian step in seeking to erase the identity of a people whose existence it would like to deny,” she said. “RFA will continue to provide audiences in Myanmar with access to trustworthy, reliable journalism, particularly when reporting on issues that local and state-controlled media ignores and suppresses.”

Spokesman Mahajan said RFA’s programming for Myanmar would remain available on its website, on Facebook and YouTube and on shortwave radio, and its reporters will continue to work in the country.

In Cambodia, the cessation of RFA broadcasts on local media last year was followed by the closing under pressure of its office and in November by the arrest of two of its former reporters on “espionage” charges that are generally considered to be trumped up as a way to intimidate the media.

RFA, which is loosely modeled on longtime broadcaster Radio Free Europe, carries broadcasts to China, Cambodia, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam as well as Myanmar. It is funded by the U.S. government but run by an independent board.

DVB — the Democratic Voice of Burma — was originally established in 1992 as a shortwave radio station in Norway to beam uncensored news to Myanmar when it was still under military rule. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its relationship with RFA.

By Associated Press

June 9, 2018

KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh – Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled attacks in Myanmar said they were disappointed that a U.N. agreement signed earlier this week did not address one of their key demands: Citizenship.

Most refugees say they are desperate to go home, but fear going back unless they are given protection and citizenship.

On Wednesday, Myanmar and U.N. agencies signed an agreement that could —eventually — lead to the return of some of the 700,000 Rohingya who fled persecution in their homeland and are now crowded into makeshift camps in Bangladesh.

While the refugees welcomed the talks, they have also heard years of empty promises from the government in Yangon.

Mohammed Toiteb Ali, who fled brutal attacks last year that sent hundreds of thousands of Rohingya across the border, said Yangon could first give citizenship to the Rohingya who remain in Myanmar.

"When we are assured by seeing and knowing that they are enjoying their citizenship, then we will go back," Ali said Friday, while strolling through the crowded market of the Kutupalong refugee camp.

Many said they would not be truly happy with an agreement unless it announces that the Rohingya will get citizenship and the return of the property they lost in the pogroms.

"When the whole world will see this, when we will see these developments, then we will go back," said Mohammed Syed, another refugee who fled last year.

U.N. officials have called the agreement an important first step in complex discussions.

The agreement signed Wednesday will create a "framework of cooperation" designed to create conditions for "voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable" repatriation of the Rohingya. It does not address Myanmar's denial of citizenship to the Rohingya.

Myanmar officials say they hope the agreement will speed up repatriation, but rights groups doubt Yangon will let many Rohingya go back, or if officials can guarantee the safety of those who do.

Myanmar's statement didn't use the word "Rohingya," reflecting the insistence by the government and the country's Buddhist majority that the ethnic group doesn't even exist. Most people in Myanmar view the Rohingya as illegal migrants from Bangladesh, though some have lived in the country for centuries, before modern borders existed. The agreement described the refugees as "displaced persons."

Myanmar security forces have been accused of laying waste to Rohingya villages last year in Rakhine state, near the Bangladesh border, where most Rohingya lived. The military's self-proclaimed "clearance operations" were set off by a Rohingya militant group's assault on police posts.

The U.N. and the U.S. have described the military campaign as "ethnic cleansing."

U.N. officials note that the Wednesday agreement gives its agencies access to Rakhine state, allowing it to better assess the situation and inform refugees about conditions back in their villages.

By Edith M. Lederer

June 6, 2018

By Associated Press

April 21, 2018

BIREUEN, INDONESIA — A Rohingya Muslim man among the group of 76 rescued in Indonesian waters in a wooden boat says they were at sea for nine days after leaving Myanmar, where the minority group faces intense persecution, and were hoping to reach Malaysia. 

The eight children, 25 women and 43 men were brought ashore Friday afternoon at Bireuen in Aceh province on the island of Sumatra, the third known attempt by members of the ethnic minority to escape Myanmar by sea this month. Several required medical attention for dehydration and exhaustion, local authorities said.

Fariq Muhammad said he paid the equivalent of about $150 for a place on the boat that left from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where a violent military crackdown on the minority group sparked an exodus of some 700,000 refugees over land into neighboring Bangladesh since August. 

The refugee vessel was intercepted by a Thai navy frigate and later escorted by a Thai patrol vessel until sighting land, Fariq said. The group believed the Thais understood they wanted to reach Malaysia and were dismayed when they realized they were in Indonesia, said Fariq, who gave the identification numbers of the Thai vessels. 

'We could not stay'

“We were forced to leave because we could not stay, could not work so our lives became difficult in Myanmar. Our identity card was not given so we were forced to go,” he told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Local officials and a charitable group are providing shelter and food for the refugees. The International Organization for Migration said it has sent a team from its Medan office in Sumatra, including Rohingya interpreters, to help local officials with humanitarian assistance. 

Rohingya, treated as undesirables in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar and denied citizenship, used to flee by sea by the thousands each year until security in Myanmar was tightened after a surge of refugees in 2015 caused regional alarm. 

Third attempt in April

In April, there has been an apparent increase in Rohingya attempts to leave the country by sea. An Indonesian fishing boat rescued a group of five Rohingya in weak condition off westernmost Aceh province April 6, after a 20-day voyage in which five other people died. 

Just days before, Malaysian authorities intercepted a vessel carrying 56 people believed to be Rohingya refugees and brought the vessel and its passengers to shore. 

Mohammad Saleem, part of the group that landed Friday in Aceh, said they left from Sittwe in Rakhine state, the location of displacement camps for Rohingya set up following attacks in 2012 by Buddhist mobs. 

“We’re not allowed to do anything. We don’t have a livelihood,” the 25-year-old said. “We can only live in the camps with not enough food to eat there. We have no rights there.”

By Edith M. Lederer 

Associated Press

April 14, 2018

UNITED NATIONS — A new U.N. report puts Myanmar’s armed forces on a U.N. blacklist of government and rebel groups “credibly suspected” of carrying out rapes and other acts of sexual violence in conflict for the first time.

An advance copy of Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ report to the Security Council, obtained Friday by The Associated Press, says international medical staff and others in Bangladesh have documented that many of the almost 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled from Myanmar “bear the physical and psychological scars of brutal sexual assault.”

The U.N. chief said the assaults were allegedly perpetrated by the Myanmar Armed Forces, known as the Tatmadaw, “at times acting in concert with local militias, in the course of military ‘clearance’ operations in October 2016 and August 2017.”

“The widespread threat and use of sexual violence was integral to this strategy, serving to humiliate, terrorize and collectively punish the Rohingya community, as a calculated tool to force them to flee their homelands and prevent their return,” Guterres said.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar doesn’t recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group, insisting they are Bengali migrants from Bangladesh living illegally in the country. It has denied them citizenship, leaving them stateless.

The recent spasm of violence began when Rohingya insurgents launched a series of attacks last Aug. 25 on about 30 security outposts and other targets. Myanmar security forces then began a scorched-earth campaign against Rohingya villages that the U.N. and human rights groups have called a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

“Violence was visited upon women, including pregnant women, who are seen as custodians and propagators of ethnic identity, as well as on young children, who represent the future of the group,” Guterres said. “This can be linked to an inflammatory narrative alleging that high fertility rates among the Rohingya represent an existential threat to the majority population.”

The report, which will be a focus of a U.N. Security Council meeting Monday on preventing sexual violence in conflict, puts 51 government, rebel and extremist groups on the list.

They include 17 from Congo including the armed forces and national police, seven from Syria including the armed forces and intelligence services, six each from Central African Republic and South Sudan, five from Mali, four from Somalia, three from Sudan, one each from Iraq and Myanmar, and Boko Haram which operates in several countries.

“As a general trend,” Guterres said, “the rise or resurgence of conflict and violent extremism, with its ensuing proliferation of arms, mass displacement, and collapsed rule of law, triggers patterns of sexual violence.”

This was evident in many places in 2017 as insecurity spread to new regions in Central African Republic, violence surged in eastern and central Congo, conflict engulfed South Sudan, violence wracked Syria and Yemen, and “’ethnic cleansing’ in the guise of clearance operations unfolded in Northern Rakhine State, Myanmar,” he said.

Guterres said most victims are “politically and economically marginalized women and girls” concentrated in remote, rural areas with the least access to services that can help them, and in refugee camps and areas for the displaced.

The year 2017 “also saw sexual violence continue to be employed as a tactic of war, terrorism, torture and repression,” he said, citing conflicts in CAR, Congo, Iraq, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan as examples of “this alarming trend.”

Guterres said sexual violence continues to serve as a “push factor” for forced displacement in places such as Colombia, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and Syria. And he said it remained “a heightened risk in transit, refugee and displacement settings.”

The secretary-general said the effects of sexual violence can impact generations as a result of trauma, stigma, poverty, poor health and unwanted pregnancy.

In South Sudan, for instance, Guterres said sexual violence is so prevalent that a Commission of Inquiry described women and girls as “collectively traumatized.” He said children born of this violence have been labeled “bad blood” or “children of the enemy” and warned that this vulnerability “may leave them susceptible to recruitment, radicalization and trafficking.”

Guterres said many women, including Rohingya refugees, are reluctant to return to locations they fled where forces including alleged perpetrators remain in control.

“Colombia is the only country in which children conceived through wartime rape are legally recognized as victims, though it has been difficult for them to access redress without being stigmatized,” he said.

The secretary-general lamented that “most incidents of mass rape continue to be met with mass impunity.”

For example, Guterres said, not a single member of the Islamic State extremist group or Boko Haram “has been prosecuted for sexual violence offenses to date.”

By Associated Press

April 11, 2018

DHAKA, Bangladesh — A Myanmar Cabinet minister on Wednesday visited a sprawling refugee camp in Bangladesh for Rohingya Muslims, who described the violence that forced them to flee Myanmar and presented a list of demands for their repatriation.

Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye met with about 40 Rohingya refugees at the Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar for more than an hour, sometimes exchanging heated words.

A Rohingya leader, Abdur Rahim, said at least eight rape victims were among those who met with Win Myat Aye. Rahim said the group presented 13 demands for the government to meet for their return to Myanmar.

About 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled army-led violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar since last August and are living in crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh. The two countries agreed in December to begin repatriating them in January, but they were delayed by concerns among aid workers and Rohingya that they would be forced to return and face unsafe conditions in Myanmar.

Hundreds of Rohingya were reportedly killed in the recent violence, and many houses and villages were burned to the ground. The United Nations and the U.S. have described the army crackdown as “ethnic cleansing.”

Bangladesh has given Myanmar a list of more than 8,000 refugees to begin the repatriation, but it has been further delayed by a complicated verification process.

Win Myat Aye did not specify a timeframe for the repatriation but said it should begin as soon as possible.

Rahim said the group became angry when Win Myat Aye said the Rohingya refugees must accept national verification cards to be provided by Myanmar in which they state they are migrants from Bangladesh.

“We protested,” he said. “We have told him it is not acceptable, we belong to Burma (Myanmar),” he told The Associated Press by phone.

Rohingya Muslims have long been treated as outsiders in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, even though their families have lived in the country for generations. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982, effectively rendering them stateless. They are denied freedom of movement and other basic rights.

Rahim said they demanded to be recognized as citizens of Myanmar before the repatriation starts and that their security arrangements be supervised by the United Nations.

“We told him clearly we want to go back and we want our home, our land and everything back,” he said.

Rohingya who have been repatriated in the past after previous refugee exoduses have been forced to live in camps in Myanmar.

Rahim said the rape victims described their experiences to Win Myat Aye.

“He listened to them patiently and said they will punish those responsible,” Rahim said.

He said the minister mentioned that authorities have already investigated some cases and that 10 soldiers have been sentenced to 10 years in jail for rape.

“He promised that once we are back, they will continue their investigation and punish those responsible,” he said.

“After initial hiccups, we discussed our points in a friendly manner,” Rahim said.

Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, Abul Kalam, said the minister listened to the refugees and replied to their questions.

“He has come here to talk to their people. They talked, we just provided them that support,” Kalam said by phone from Cox’s Bazar.

Police superintendent A.K.M. Iqbal Hossain said the minister praised Bangladesh’s government and international agencies for their work in supporting the Rohingya people.

“He seemed to be serious about his words,” Hossain said.

The recent violence erupted after an insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, attacked security outposts in Rakhine in late August. The military and Buddhist mobs launched retaliatory attacks on Rohingya that were termed “clearance operations.”

Win Myat Aye, who arrived on Wednesday for a three-day visit, also is to meet with Bangladeshi officials including the home minister and foreign minister.

Associated Press reporter in Cox’s Bazar Tofayel Ahmad contributed to the story.

By Trevor Marshallsea 

Associated Press 

March 18, 2018

SYDNEY — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Saturday that the displacement of Rohingya Muslims was no longer solely a domestic issue for Myanmar, as Southeast Asian nations signed a counterterrorism cooperation agreement at a regional leaders’ conference.

Najib made his comments at a meeting of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, being hosted by Australia. The summit has been marked by protests against the regimes of Myanmar and Cambodia.

In a pointed and rare departure from the grouping’s policy of non-interference in the affairs of fellow member nations, Najib said Rohingya refugees fleeing from alleged persecution by Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s government were a prime target for radicalization from the Islamic State group.

“Because of the suffering of the Rohingya people and their displacement around the region, the situation in Rakhine state in Myanmar can no longer be considered to be a purely domestic matter,” Najib said in closing comments before the signing of the counterterrorism agreement. “In addition, the problem should not be looked at through the humanitarian prism only, because it has the potential of developing into a serious security threat to the region.”

“Rakhine, with thousands of despairing and dejected people who see no hope in the future, will be a fertile ground for radicalization and recruitment” by the Islamic State and affiliated groups, he added.

Before resuming his seat on a leaders’ panel beside Suu Kyi, Najib said Malaysia was “ready to assist and find a just and durable solution,” as it had with fellow ASEAN nations Thailand and the Philippines on terrorism-related issues.

Myanmar staunchly denies that its security forces have targeted civilians in its “clearance operations” in Rakhine state on Myanmar’s west coast. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, has bristled at the international criticism. But Myanmar’s denials have appeared increasingly tenuous as horrific accounts from refugees have accumulated.

The Associated Press last month documented through video and witness accounts at least five mass graves of Rohingya civilians. Witnesses reported that the military used acid to erase the identity of victims. The government denied it, maintaining that only “terrorists” were killed and then “carefully buried.”

Malaysia has a large Rohingya population who are considered by the government to be illegal immigrants rather than refugees.

A few hundred meters (yards) from the conference, around 1,000 protesters demonstrated against alleged human rights abuses against Rohingya people, brandishing anti-Suu Kyi placards. More than 600,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar in recent years. A second, smaller protest was held to condemn human rights abuses in Cambodia attributed to its leader, Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Protesters also targeted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for hosting the conference. Australia is not a full member of ASEAN, but is an active dialogue partner.

“We would very much like to remind the prime minister that many of the hands he’s shaking yesterday, today and tomorrow are hands full of blood,” protest leader Hong Lim, a member of Victoria state’s parliament, said outside Sydney’s Town Hall.

Turnbull hailed as a major breakthrough the signing of the memorandum of understanding on counterterrorism, at a time of increased risk to the region due to militants fleeing Islamic State losses in the Middle East.

The measures include cracking down on the movement of terrorists between ASEAN nations, tightening policing on the cross-border movement of money to fund terrorism, and targeting on-line methods of radicalization and instruction on how to commit terrorist acts.

“We know that ISIL’s operational and ideological influence in our region is growing,” Turnbull said, referring to the Islamic State group. “More fighters will seek to return to our region, and they will return battle-hardened and trained.”

“Our ASEAN friends and neighbors share our interest in regional peace and they share our commitment to respecting international law and that rules-based order which underpins our way of live, secures our prosperity and safety,” he added.

Turnbull said the memorandum of understanding addressed more innovative methods being used to support and fund terrorism, such as moving money through digital currencies and crowd-funding platforms that made it harder to detect terrorism funding.

Internet-based communications, such as encrypted online messaging systems, also make it easier for extremists to instruct converts abroad.

“Those who seek to do us harm use technology as innovatively as any of us can,” Turnbull said. “And they are able to adapt and move in a very agile way. We have to be as fast and as quick as them.”

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib called on ASEAN members to “step up and intensify cooperation in preventing the spread of terrorist ideologies and to hone even more effective approaches to counter the threats of radicalization and violent extremism in the Asia-Pacific area.”

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Associated Press writer Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, contributed to this report.

Myanmar’s Permanent Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ministry Myint Thu speaks to journalists during a press conference about the situation of Rakhine State at Information Ministry in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, Wednesday, March 14, 2018. Myanmar’s authorities on Tuesday said it is an appropriate time to invite the United Nations refugee and the development agencies to involve in the repatriation of Rohingya refugees who had fled to Bangladesh from violence in Myanmar. (Aung Shine Oo/Associated Press)

By Associated Press

March 13, 2018

NAYPYITAW, Myanmar — Senior officials in Myanmar announced Wednesday that they have begun talks with U.N. agencies to see how they could assist with the repatriation of Rohingya refugees who fled to Bangladesh to escape violence against them.

Foreign Ministry Permanent Secretary Myint Thu said the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.N. Development Program responded last week with a proposal and concept paper to the government’s invitation for U.N. involvement, which the government is now studying.

“We considered that the time is now appropriate to invite UNHCR and UNDP to be involved in the repatriation and resettlement process, as well as in carrying out activities supporting the livelihoods and development for all communities in Rakhine state,” Myint Thu said.

Human rights experts believe safety cannot yet be guaranteed for about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled the western state of Rakhine to Bangladesh after security forces carried out brutal crackdowns in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents last August.

Antagonism between Rakhine’s Buddhist community and Rohingya Muslims led to communal violence in 2012, forcing at least 140,000 Rohingya from their homes into squalid camps for internally displaced people. Most Rohingya are treated as stateless persons with limited rights, and the insurgents drew support from the discontented as prejudice against their community grew in overwhelming Buddhist Myanmar.

Stanislav Saling, a U.N. spokesman in Myanmar, confirmed that in response to Myanmar’s initiative, the U.N. agencies submitted a note proposing how they could help create conditions “for the safe, dignified and voluntary return for refugees, in line with international principles.”

Neither the U.N. nor the government made public details of the proposal.

The international community has accused Myanmar’s military of atrocities against the Rohingya that could amount to ethnic cleansing, but the government and military deny any organized human rights violations.

Myanmar’s civilian government led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has pledged to start the gradual repatriation of the Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh.

Myanmar’s government says 374 refugees out of more than 8,000 whom Bangladesh has verified as qualified to return are free to return at their convenience.

“We have handed the list of 374 people to the Bangladesh Embassy so that they can immediately start their repatriation,” Myint Thu said. “These 374 people can be the first repatriation batch.”

By Tofayel Ahmad

Associated Press

March 9, 2018

From their home, a tent hastily erected in a grassy field, the young Muslim Rohingya couple can see the village they left behind last year, fleeing attacks by Buddhist mobs and Myanmar security forces.

They arrived in a no man's land, one of the small, ill-defined areas that exist at the cloudiest edges of the borderlands, places that seem to be neither Myanmar nor Bangladesh. While nearly every other Rohingya refugee who crossed the border has sought protection in the immense camps a few miles deeper into Bangladesh, these people say they will go no farther.

"My ancestors' graves are there," said Abdul Naser, gesturing toward his village, less than 100 meters (yards) away. "Sometimes, I walk close to the barbed wire fence and touch my land, and I cry in the dark."

But a few weeks ago things changed. Myanmar deployed more soldiers to the border, some of whom began coming to within 10 meters (yards) of the refugees' homes. They shout insults at the Rohingya, the refugees say, they throw empty whiskey bottles. They have set up speakers that blare announcements, insisting people go further into Bangladesh.

Because to Myanmar, no man's land doesn't exist at all.

"We cannot accept the term 'no man's land' because that is our land," said Nyan Myint Kyaw, Myanmar's deputy commander of the border police. Shifting rivers may have washed away some border markers, he says, and fences may not have been erected everywhere. But he insists the 6,000 or so Rohingya who think they live between the two countries are actually living inside Myanmar.

It is easy to get confused on the border, where many areas are not marked at all and where it's sometimes unclear if a fence marks someone's personal land, or if it demarcates the frontier. Making things more complicated, Myanmar places its border fences 150 feet from the actual boundary line.

While Myanmar insists all the hazy territory is their land, its security forces — as well as Bangladesh security forces — are also very careful to avoid entering places seen as a no man's land, presumably fearing accidental clashes and diplomatic trouble.

Myanmar says the additional soldiers were deployed to stop possible cross-border attacks by Rohingya militants, though no such attacks are known to have occurred. When Bangladesh protested the deployments, Myanmar dismissed their complaints.

"This is not like we are trying to invade Bangladesh," Myanmar spokesman Zaw Htay said in early March. "These are only actions taken against the terrorist groups."

The Rohingya have long lived at the ragged fringes of life in Myanmar, denied citizenship and many of the most basic rights. They are derided as "Bengalis" and many in Myanmar believe they are illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation, most live in poverty in Myanmar's Rakhine state, next to Bangladesh.

The most recent problems began in August, when Rohingya insurgents launched a series of unprecedented attacks on Myanmar security posts. Myanmar responded with overwhelming force, burning Muslim villages with the help of Buddhist mobs, raping women, looting homes and carrying out massacres. Some 700,000 Rohingya fled the attacks into Bangladesh. Aid groups say more than 6,700 people were killed.

The UN refugee agency has appealed for protection for the borderland Rohingya.

The agency "is concerned about the safety of a group of vulnerable Rohingya women, men and children from Myanmar, who have been living in a so-called 'no man's land,'" it said in a statement. "People who have fled violence in their country must be granted safety and protection."

But is the no man's land inside Myanmar? Even the Rohingya say some of it probably is, though there are plenty of places where even border guards aren't sure where to find the dividing line.

A Rohingya community leader says most of the 6,000 in the borderlands are from nearby villages.

"They do not want to leave the place or enter Bangladesh, hoping that they will go back one day and it will be easier to move from here," Dil Mohammed said.

The young Rohingya couple agreed with him. They want to keep their village in sight. Or at least what's left of it.

"My trees are still there," said Naser's wife, 20-year-old Ruksana Begum. "It's spring now. I can see the green leaves of my mango trees. They have burned our homes but my trees are still growing."

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AP writers Julhas Alam in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Esther Htusan contributed to this report.

By Ashraf Khalil 

Associated Press

March 7, 2018

WASHINGTON — The United States Holocaust Museum is revoking a major human rights award given to Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian leader, saying she has failed to respond adequately to the mass killings of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

The museum announced Wednesday that the Elie Wiesel Award given to Suu Kyi in 2012 would be rescinded. The move is just the latest in a series of blows to Suu Kyi’s international reputation, which has plummeted over the Rohingya massacres.

Suu Kyi was a Mandela-like figure in Myanmar who spent years under house arrest for opposing the country’s military dictatorship. She became an international rallying point and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Her party won a landslide victory in 2015 and she assumed the newly created post of state counselor, although the military still retains significant political and economic power.

Hopes had been high for Suu Kyi to make the transition from revered opposition figure to reformist political leader, given her long campaign for democracy. 

Instead, human rights advocates consider her a disappointment, particularly in her response to the Rohingya killings.

The Holocaust Museum has embraced the plight of the Rohingya in recent years, and published a report in November that concluded there was “mounting evidence of genocide” committed by both the military and armed Buddhist extremists.

In a letter to Suu Kyi released Wednesday, the museum accused her government of obstructing United Nations investigators and promoting “hateful rhetoric” against the Rohingya community, even as it acknowledged she has little influence over the military.

The museum had hoped Suu Kyi “would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population,” the letter stated. “The severity of the atrocities in recent months demand that you use your moral authority to address this situation.”

Suu Kyi does not oversee her country’s military or its security operations that set off the exodus of Rohingya refugees, but three former fellow Nobel Peace laureates last month accused her and the army of committing genocide in northern Rakhine state. They said that as the country’s leader she cannot avoid responsibility. Her government has defended the military operation in the north and has embraced the prosecution of journalists along with other attempts to suppress and discredit the media.

Calls to Myanmar’s embassy for comment were not immediately returned.

By Foster Klug

Associated Press

February 7, 2018

NAYAPARA REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh — Abdul Goni says the Myanmar government was starving his family one stage at a time.

First, soldiers stopped the Rohingya Muslim from walking three hours to the forest for the firewood he sold to feed his family. Then Buddhist neighbors and seven soldiers took his only cow, which he rented out to fertilize rice fields. Next, he says, they killed his uncle and strung him up on a wire for trying to stop the theft of his buffalos.

By the time Goni saw bodies floating down the local river, of fellow Rohingya killed for illegal fishing, he knew his family would die if they didn't leave. On bad days, they carved the flesh out of banana plant stalks for food. On the worst days, his children ate nothing.

"I felt so sorry that I couldn't give them enough food," the 25-year-old says, tears running down his face, in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, just across the border from Myanmar. "Everything just got worse and worse. ... Day by day, the pressure was increasing all around us. They used to tell us, 'This isn't your land. ... We'll starve you out.'"

First, massacres, rapes and the wholesale destruction of villages by the Myanmar military in western Rakhine state forced nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh, in reprisal for Rohingya militant attacks on Aug. 25. Now, the food supply appears to be another weapon that's being used against the dwindling numbers of Rohingya in Myanmar.

The accounts of hunger could not be independently confirmed, as Myanmar's government does not allow reporters into the northern part of Rakhine state, where most of the Rohingya lived. However, more than a dozen interviews by The Associated Press with the most recent refugees show growing desperation, as the noose tightens around their communities in what U.N. officials have said may be a genocide. The U.N. and human rights groups such as Amnesty International have also warned of increasing hunger among the Rohingya in areas where conflict and displacement have been most rampant.

Repeated calls to Myanmar's military weren't answered, but the Myanmar government denies ethnic cleansing and says it is battling terrorists. Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye says the government has been distributing food aid to as many people as possible.

"There are many ways that we have been reaching out to villagers frequently," he says. "And that's why it's not possible that there are people who are completely cut off from food or facing hunger."

The Rohingya Muslims, who have been loathed by Myanmar's Buddhist majority for decades, are locked down in their villages — sometimes even in their homes — and prevented from farming, fishing, foraging, trade and work, the refugees and aid groups say. In other words, they can no longer do what they need to do to eat. While restrictions on freedom of movement and access to food have long been in place, they have tightened dramatically in recent weeks, the AP interviews show.

"It was worse than a jail," says Goni, who finally left Hpa Yon Chaung village in Buthidaung township on Jan. 5. "People at least get food twice a day in jail. ...We were always surrounded, always under stress, always watched."

The hunger the Rohingya faced at home is evident when they come to the Bangladesh camps, where new refugees, especially children and women, suffer from "unbelievable" levels of malnutrition, according to Dr. Ismail Mehr.

"They are definitely coming in starving," says Mehr, who recently returned to the United States from treating refugees in the camps. "We saw the vitamin deficiencies in the children and the adults; we saw ... severely malnourished people who are basically skin and bones. It looked like the pictures from the Nazi camps."

The government's restrictions on access to northern Rakhine make it almost impossible to tell how many people are without food, how widespread the problem is or whether people are dying. The International Committee of the Red Cross, based in Yangon, says that since the end of August it has distributed food to more than 180,000 people in northern Rakhine state. The World Food Program said it was granted access in December and January to field locations including Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Mrauk U townships for the first time since August.

The people AP interviewed were mostly from Buthidaung township, where many day laborers, farmers and foragers were hit hard when the restrictions tightened, and Rathedaung township, where the impoverished Muslim communities are often encircled by Buddhists.

Mohammad Ilyas, 55, fled to Bangladesh with only a shirt and a lungi sarong, along with dozens of others from Rathedaung township. He says the military and his neighbors took Rohingya rice paddies and rice stockpiles.

"Sometimes we stayed hungry for a day, two days, even five days," Ilyas, who is from Ah Nauk Pyin village, says. "The Myanmar government doesn't want a single Muslim to remain there. They want to erase us completely."

Activists, aid groups and researchers say Myanmar squeezed the Rohingya by severely hampering many of the humanitarian operations that were crucial for their survival. Food aid was further disrupted by violence in 2016 and the bloodshed after Rohingya insurgents staged an unprecedented wave of 30 attacks on security posts across Rakhine state in August and killed at least 14 people.

Even before August, aid agencies in 2017 predicted a spike in severe malnutrition in children. In a report released today, Amnesty International details evidence of forced starvation by the military, including stopping the Rohingya from harvesting their rice fields in November and December. The Food and Agriculture Organization has also warned that the lack of access to food and fuel are adding to hunger in Myanmar.

Buddhists in Rakhine state began blocking food aid when they noticed that the Muslims were getting more than they were, according to Thomas MacManus, a specialist in international state crimes at Queen Mary University of London who has researched the Rohingya since 2012. Tightened curfews meant people couldn't harvest shrimp or rice, tend to their cattle, gather firewood or fish. Since August, an almost 24-hour-a-day curfew means no one is leaving their villages, he says.

MacManus says the Myanmar government has regularly employed a scorched-earth strategy that has denied food to other ethnic groups it has battled, including the Shan and the Kachin.

"What they're trying to do is design a situation where life just doesn't become livable anymore," he says. "You just block off an area and they can't get material or food. It is a time-honored way of doing genocide, and one of the easiest ways because you can do it slowly and without too much attention."

In this war on food, rice paddies are a major battlefield.

Last fall the Myanmar military stopped farmer Rashid Ahmed, 60, from harvesting his rice fields, which were about a 15-minute walk outside a village he could no longer leave. He stood by helpless as his Buddhist neighbors, assisted by the military, collected his rice and took his six buffalos. Without food, he says, he could not stay.

"It would have been better if they had just shot us instead of starving us out," says Ahmed, thin but wiry from years of field work, as he sat in a long hut with dozens of other new arrivals to the Bangladesh camps. "What they did was slower; it was crueler. They left us to imagine the worst, to wake up every day and think about what would happen when there was no food at all."

His family ate so many banana stalks that by the time they left, all 20 plants in his compound were gone.

"I always grew my own food, and now suddenly I couldn't feed myself or my family," says Ahmed, who is from Zay Di Taung village.

After Aug. 25, when he was trapped in his village, Mohammad Rafique, 25, a day laborer from Hpa Yon Chaung, survived on rice he'd stockpiled in his home. When that ran out in October, he sold family jewelry to get rice. When the money was gone, he begged from neighbors who still had rice stockpiles, often going without food so his children could eat.

"The market was closed; no one was harvesting," he says. "I was eating only once a day, sometimes not at all. ... I felt shame that I had to beg for food, but I had no other choice."

Without rice, things got very bad for the Rohingya very quickly.

Aid groups couldn't reach them regularly. The Buddhists blockaded their villages and wouldn't hire them; they put an embargo on Rohingya goods and even stopped selling them phone cards so they couldn't communicate with the outside world, according to aid groups. The Muslims ate through their stockpiles; they borrowed from friends and neighbors; then they ran out.

Food became so hard to get for Mohammad Hashim, 25, a wood cutter from Pyin La village, that he and his family sometimes ate broken rice grains normally given to chickens.

"We sometimes went two days without food," Hashim says. "They treated us like animals."

Goni says that of the 500 families who lived near him, around 150 have fled to Bangladesh. Everyone else wants to leave, he said, but they either don't have enough money or are too old.

"Some families have enough food because they stockpiled rice, but that can't last forever," he says. "If they can't get to Bangladesh, and they run out of rice, the only option is death."

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Associated Press video journalist Rishabh Jain contributed to this report.