It was 10 o’clock in the morning on a mid-November day when Myanmar military marched into village Caruprong of Maungdaw district under Rakhaine state.
‘The army gathered all the village women in some rooms, and whom they deemed beautiful, were made to get into a vehicle and took them away,’ recounts Fatema Khatun at a Teknaf camp in Bangladesh, where she could reach after a perilous journey.
Like her, thousands fled what has largely been described as ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims by the Myanmar army.
‘And before being killed, the rest women were raped by the military men in an adjacent room,’ continued 25-year-old Fatema, six-month pregnant, who was not spared from being raped by a military officer.
‘I do not know what happened to the women who were taken away by the military,’ said Fatema.
She does not know where her husband is as she had to run away after military left the village. She took shelter in the nearby jungle along with many others of her village.
‘I was hobbling, afraid of further rape and could not walk out in the open. Some of my villagers took care of me,’ Fatema narrates her ordeal in reaching here.
She lived in the jungle for two weeks before finally moving toward border at night amid the ongoing military drive in the Rohingya villages.
During their stay in the jungle, she survived by having jungle fruits and leaves of trees.
Sometimes, she recollects, they could collect some foods from the nearby villages.
The crowd in the jungle kept swelling as more and more people poured in there along the border in a bid to sneak into Bangladesh.
‘At one point, the military started rummaging through the forest,’ said Fatema.
The military raids came in retaliation for the October 9 attack on a Myanmar border outpost in the district that killed nine security men.
The Myanmar government blamed the attack on the minority Muslim Rohingya insurgents and launched a massive anti-insurgent operation that turned out to be genocide of the Rohingyas, driving at least 30,000 out of their homes, according to the UN.
Fatema joined hundreds along the Myanmar border trying to enter Bangladesh.
There she watched mothers and kids starving for days as they waited in forest or in water along the sea coast to get the chance of sailing across the River Naf to enter into Bangladesh.
She had to pay Tk 1,500 to make the trip across the river.
Fatema entered Bangladesh on December 1. She is currently sheltered at Leda makeshift settlement camp.
Over 4,000 Rohingya refugees have so far entered the camp as, according to the UN, above 10,000 Rohingya refugees, have already entered Bangladesh, though Rohingya leaders put the number at 20,000.
Like Fatema, refugees interviewed by New Age at Leda and Kutupalong camps, gave horrific description of the brutality by the military.
After their villages were burned down, they first tried to take shelter in nearby villages thinking that such brutality would not continue. But the situation worsened further.
The military continue to unleash brutality on villages after villages by burning houses, slitting throats of the males, raping women, throwing kids into fire and beating everyone who came in their way.
Interviews of the refugees reveal names of at least 22 villages that were razed to the ground by the Myanmar military since early November.
Human Rights Watch released a report on satellite images showing over a thousand houses torched between the first and the second weeks of November.
According to the refugees, most of the time the military personnel burnt to ashes the bodies and sometimes they dismembered the bodies to pieces and buried them altogether.
Rohingyas are denied citizenship in Myanmar and reviled by the Buddhist-majority mainstream population.
The state-sponsored attack on them is the third of its kind since 1978 that forced 3 lakh to 5 lakh people to take shelter in Bangladesh over the years.
Still, Fatema wants to go back to Myanmar.
‘I want to go back home,’ said Hasina, another victim. – See more at: http://www.newagebd.net/article/4297/raped-tortured-rohingya-women-set-off-on-desperate-journey#sthash.VGTvqbuC.dpuf
Source: New Age