No Rohingya woman safe as rapists run rampant, say experts

Cox Bazar—Rape is being used as a weapon of war in the Rohingya crisis, with no woman safe from the risk of sexual attack as Myanmar’s Muslim minority is driven out of its homeland, according to experts in the field and those caught up in the crisis.

Doctors treating some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in recent weeks have seen dozens of women with injuries consistent with violent sexual attacks, according to UN clinicians.

And women interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation tell of violent rape by Myanmar security forces as they flee their homes, part of a mass Rohingya exodus.

“The Burmese (Myanmar) military has clearly used rape as one of a range of horrific methods of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” said Skye Wheeler, a sexual violence expert with Human Rights Watch who has assessed the fast-filling camps.

“Rape and other forms of sexual violence has been widespread and systematic as well as brutal, humiliating and traumatic,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Myanmar dismisses all such accusations of ethnic cleansing, saying it has to tackle insurgents, whom it accuses of starting fires and attacking civilians, as well as the security forces.

Yet villagers fleeing the violence say rape is a routine weapon in the military’s armoury, with the United Nations now deliberating whether the violence amounts to genocide.

Gang rape

Whatever the legal definition, 18-year-old Nurshida knows only too well what happened to her.

Speaking to Thomson Reuters Foundation from the relative safety of her camp, Nurshida recalled how her class of 30 was marched in silence to their school last month, held at gunpoint by uniformed soldiers, then manhandled into the main auditorium.

The schoolgirls, she said, cowered as one in a corner; the men – breathing heavily and dripping sweat – occupied another.

The gang rape began immediately.

Fair-skinned Nurshida, with bangles looping her wrist and a loose scarf shrouding her hair, said she was chosen first by the group, six clean-shaven soldiers carrying guns and machetes.

“One of the men held me tightly on the floor. I started screaming, but a second soldier hit me in the face with his hand and undressed me fully. I was silent when they raped me, there was nothing I could do,” Nurshida said.

Her two friends were thrown to the floor next. As they were raped, smoke was rising in the distance – her native Naisapru village was on fire, one of many set alight in the exodus.

“All of the schoolgirls were raped and there were loud screams everywhere,” said Nurshida, sitting in a mud hut in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong camp where she is waiting to register as a refugee.

Authorities say her story fits a horribly familiar pattern.

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