The idea of home is the most reassuring in the world, and being denied one makes for one of the most harrowing experiences someone can be subjected to.
Bearing startling similarities with the gory event of Partition, a Muslim ethnic group from Myanmar, known as the Rohingyas, have practically nowhere to go. In the Buddhist dominated Myanmar, these Sunni Muslims are hated and viewed as illegal immigrants. Speaking in a dialect that is generally used in Chittagong in southeast Bangladesh, they are often taunted as ‘Bengali’ even though they have lived in Myanmar for several years.
Some of those who have fled from Myanmar settled in the southern coastal district of Bangladesh as refugees. But their problems hardly seem to be over, as Bangladesh allows and recognises only a meager portion of them as refugees, and the rest who try to cross the border are turned back.
Recently, Metro published some horrific images which not only highlighted the plight of this community, but also revealed cruelty which refugees face every day. Six-month-old infant, Jane Alam, suffering from starvation and pneumonia, died minutes after reaching Bangladesh.
After being turned away from Myanmar, the family was in hiding in the hills for 20 days with hardly any food. Finally, Alam’s mother Noor Begum managed to make her way to a camp in Teknaf, but it was too late to save her son.
The emaciated body of Alam was buried at a graveyard on a hillside.
As gruesome as it may be, this accounts for only one of the many brutalities carried out against the Rohingyas in Myanmar. Each refugee from the country has ghastly stories of witnessing murder or being raped and persecuted by the military of their own country. The borders of Bangladesh are clogged as they turn up, often with nothing but the clothes they are wearing.
A woman ran away from Myanmar after the army killed her husband and one of her sons.
“My son is two years old and is crying all the time, he is very cold in the mornings. Still, compared to Myanmar, Bangladesh seems like heaven to me,” she said.
At present, it is estimated that around 30,000 people have been forcibly uprooted from their homeland putting.
H/T: Metro