A Rohingya mother's pain after 60 family members murdered

Almas Khatun saw her seven children and husband murdered during a wave of massacres in Myanmar. She and thousands of other survivors now face new threats as they languish in refugee camps.
Sitting on the dirt floor in a flimsy bamboo shelter, Almas Khatun pulls a pink shawl from her face to reveal scars across her cheek and throat.
"I saw my family killed with my own eyes," says the softly spoken 40-year-old survivor of Tula Toli, the most horrific massacre in a pogrom of indiscriminate killing, mass rape and arson targeting Rohingya Muslim civilians in Myanmar.
"I saw my family killed with my own eyes," Almas Khatun says as she recounts the horrors of the Myanmar massacres.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
"I saw my family killed with my own eyes," Almas Khatun says as she recounts the horrors of the Myanmar massacres.
Almas says that every night she sees in her nightmares a soldier pulling her three-month-old baby from her lap and slashing open his stomach, moments before her house was set alight.
She wakes and weeps amid a sprawling mass of refugee camps carved into hillsides in southeastern Bangladesh, reliving the morning of August 30. That was when soldiers ran – shooting and shouting obscenities – into Tula Toli, a picturesque village that sits in a bend where two rivers meet.
"They shot my old father, they put a log of wood in his mouth and then slit his throat," Almas says, wiping tears from her eyes. "I keep thinking about my children. They burnt all my children and I couldn't save them. It breaks my heart. They killed seven of my children, my husband and his two brothers." Almas says 60 of her relatives who were living in three houses in the village are dead.
"Some were slaughtered by monks."
More than a dozen previously interviewed witnesses to the massacre have said Buddhist monks were among the attackers, but Almas's detailed testimony implicates them directly in killings that took place in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, just across the border from Bangladesh.
During 10 days in the camps, which are now home to more than 835,000 Rohingya, we interview dozens of survivors who describe unimaginable atrocities committed by government soldiers and Buddhist mobs in Myanmar's Rakhine State since August.
Eight-year-old Mansur Alam, who also survived Tula Toli, tells us in a separate interview outside a makeshift Muslim school, on a hilltop overlooking the camps, that he saw monks slashing and shooting people in the village, including his own parents, as he hid in bushes. "The monks were in the forest and one slashed me on the head with a kirji (farming sickle)," he says, pulling apart his hair to reveal a scar across his scalp.
Other witnesses have described women and girls being dragged into huts, their screams filling the air, before men left, locking the buildings and setting them ablaze.
Mansur Alam is scarred after being hit as he fled.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Mansur Alam is scarred after being hit as he fled.
Corpses were thrown into pits, doused in petrol and burned and others were thrown into the river, according to multiple witnesses. Almas says that somehow, amid chaos and terror, she ran for her life from the house as it burned and joined Mansur, the son of her neighbour, in the bushes, hiding among dead bodies, before both were discovered and slashed.
"We pretended to be dead," she says.
"When the killers left I crawled away, dragging Mansur. We were bleeding but we somehow managed to walk through the forest to Bangladesh. We had no food or water for three days."
Orphans Forida and Nur Aisha in their uncle's shelter in Burma Para refugee camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Orphans Forida and Nur Aisha in their uncle's shelter in Burma Para refugee camp.
Almas has now adopted Mansur as her son.
A WIDE-EYED NUMBNESS
Images of exhausted and starving Rohingya, many of them injured, stumbling across the Bangladesh border have shocked the world.
Shosma Begum bathes her children, Ehsan and Asma.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Shosma Begum bathes her children, Ehsan and Asma.
Since August, almost 650,000 have made the journey.
The United Nations Human Rights Council last week condemned the "very likely commission of crimes against humanity" by Myanmar security forces. In doing so, they ignored the denials of the country's government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been widely criticised for failing to use her moral authority and domestic legitimacy to shift anti-Muslim sentiment in her country.
Refugees still arriving at the Bangladesh border say threats and intimidation are continuing against Muslims in their homeland.
Girls read the Koran at a madrasa in Burma Para camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Girls read the Koran at a madrasa in Burma Para camp.
The mass flight of the Rohingya has created humanitarian catastrophe in chaotic and disorderly camps rife with diseases, rapidly depleting and contaminated water supplies, overflowing temporary toilets, acute malnutrition, shortages of basic needs, child exploitation and trafficking.
In 25 years covering Asian crises, I have rarely seen such traumatised people.
Look into many of the faces here and you see a wide-eyed numbness that experts say points to terrible suffering and trauma.
Children wait for family members at a Red Cross food and supplies distribution point in Burma Para refugee camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Children wait for family members at a Red Cross food and supplies distribution point in Burma Para refugee camp.
Doctors Without Borders says the first extensive survey in the camps indicates that between 9425 and 13,759 Rohingya were killed in Rakhine in the first 31 days of the violence, including at least 1000 children.
Of the children below the age of five who were killed, 59 per cent were shot, 15 per cent burnt to death in their homes and seven per cent beaten to death, the survey showed.
"What we uncovered was staggering, both in terms of the numbers of people who reported a family member died as a result of violence, and the horrific ways in which they said they were killed or severely injured," says Sidney Wong, the organisation's medical director.
Uma Habi with her sister Murshida Khatun, left, weep as they talk of losing 35 family members.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Uma Habi with her sister Murshida Khatun, left, weep as they talk of losing 35 family members.
Robert Onus, the Australian emergency response co-ordinator for Doctors Without Borders, says refugees arriving at the border exhausted and not knowing what their futures hold creates a "sense of desperation that you see in people's eyes".
"This is a complex situation that is fast becoming a worst-case scenario," he says. "These families have been broken."
Wayne Bleier,a psychosocial expert with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), says that, unlike survivors of many other conflicts, Rohingya are eager to tell their horror stories "because they want the world to know what happened".
A Rohingya girl carries a blanket she has received in Burma Para refugee camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
A Rohingya girl carries a blanket she has received in Burma Para refugee camp.
THE GIRL IN THE PRETTY DRESS
Rounding a corner on a narrow, dusty track, a small group of men wearing white Islamic skull caps beckon us to a shelter made of bamboo and plastic.
Inside, 25-year-old Hasina has just finished bathing her dead two-year-old daughter, Eshoroma. They have placed palm leafs over her eyes and put on her prettiest frock.
Eshoroma, 2, lies dead.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Eshoroma, 2, lies dead.
Eshoroma had suffered an itchy rash and fever for 10 days in the shelter just a 10-minute walk from a Bangladesh hospital.
Measles is spreading rapidly through the camps.
Hasina is wailing as Kate Geraghty, a stranger carrying cameras, is ushered into the shelter. They hug.
Day labourers at a bamboo collection point. Bamboo is being used to build shelters in the camps.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Day labourers at a bamboo collection point. Bamboo is being used to build shelters in the camps.
Hasina gently strokes Eshoroma's body as it lies on a woven mat. This family fled their homeland with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Hasina has no money for a funeral and there is no land available in the camps for gravesites. We pay for Eshoroma to be buried in a mass grave.
"I am relieved. Now Allah will take care of my baby," Sobbir Hossain, the baby's 30-year-old father tells me.
Two boys start a fire to cook breakfast outside their family shelter in Kutupalong camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Two boys start a fire to cook breakfast outside their family shelter in Kutupalong camp.
A CHILDREN'S CRISIS
Fifty-four per cent of the refugees who have fled Myanmar in the past three months are children under 18.
A study by organisations including Save the Children shows that one in four aged between six months and five are suffering acute malnutrition, and many more are severely malnourished.
A mother feeds her exhausted child a jelly drink as they make their way to a refugee camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
A mother feeds her exhausted child a jelly drink as they make their way to a refugee camp.
"This is a children's crisis," says Elhadj As Sy, secretary-general of the Red Cross.
Robert Onus says families generally don't know how to access what limited health care is available in camps that stretch for kilometres across a peninsula in poor and overcrowded Bangladesh.
"They are worrying about their basic survival needs," he says.
Asad Ali took poison after a fight with his wife.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Asad Ali took poison after a fight with his wife.
Asad Ali, 54, took poison, staggered outside his shelter and collapsed, foaming from the mouth.
"My father had been quarrelling with my mother about money and clothes for us," says their 10-year-old daughter, Ami Alki, as men lift Asad into a three-wheeled motorcycle taxi and drive him to a medical clinic.
Laila Begum gently squeezes the ears of her 40-day-old baby as he clings to life, his tiny chest heaving on a bed in a Red Cross-tented field hospital.
Forty days old, Mohammed weighs just 1.8 kilograms.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Forty days old, Mohammed weighs just 1.8 kilograms.
Mohammad Ifran is so malnourished his skin is wrinkled like an old man's and his arms and legs are like twigs.
The baby's eyes open only briefly as his mother turns to stroking his head, willing him not to give up.
Nobody knows how many babies are dying here in deplorable conditions.
Laila Begum with her infant son, Mohammed Ifran.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Laila Begum with her infant son, Mohammed Ifran.
Laila has been unwell since giving birth to the baby, after making the perilous journey across the border from Myanmar.
"He can't breastfeed properly. He remains hungry because he only gets a little milk from me," Laila says.
A Red Cross doctor by chance noticed the baby's critical state as Laila was holding him on her breast. Mohammad was just 1.8 kilograms.
A woman arrives at the Sabrang border crossing on her way to a camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
A woman arrives at the Sabrang border crossing on her way to a camp.
"He would have died if he had not been treated almost immediately," says Norwegian nurse Anne Fjeldberg after declaring the baby off the critical list after two days of treatment.
"Amongst all this suffering some good things can happen too."
LITTLE BOY LOST
Queues for Red Cross supplies at Burma Para camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Queues for Red Cross supplies at Burma Para camp.
Children are increasingly vulnerable in the camps when aid workers leave to meet a night-time curfew.
They walk listlessly and barefoot through the narrow alleyways and tracks or spend days under a hot sun in lines waiting for food handouts. Some beg alongside roads.
Almost 3000 unaccompanied and separated children have been documented but the actual number is much higher, aid workers say.
Girls paint henna designs on one another.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Girls paint henna designs on one another.
Rohimullah's little boy, Ayatullah, disappeared from his family's shelter while Rohimullah was praying at a mosque and his wife was preparing food inside.
For 20 days, Rohimullah, 30, trudged through the camps until he could walk no more, holding a photograph of his 2-and-half-year-old son.
"My child was playing with other kids outside and there were these two men who were there, giving them bits of food and all of them were eating it, so the other kids told me," Rohimullah says, weeping while squatting on a dusty pathway.
Australian doctor Debra Blackmore carries Jamila Khatun at Dum Dumiya refugee camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Australian doctor Debra Blackmore carries Jamila Khatun at Dum Dumiya refugee camp.
"I don't have money to go searching for him. Someone told me a little boy was seen at a market far away and wanted money to bring him back."
Ruhimullah's search meant he could not join the queues for food.
"It's been 20 days since we've eaten properly and we don't have money," he says. "My child's mother has gone crazy. I had to tie her up." But, like the baby saved in the Red Cross field hospital, a flash of hope comes amid despair.
A man despairs in Kutupalong camp.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
A man despairs in Kutupalong camp.
After almost three weeks, Ayatullah was returned in the presence of Red Cross workers who had spread the word through community leaders and mosques to look out for him.
Who had kept him, and why, is unclear.
ONE LESS MOUTH TO FEED
Bride Yesmin, 22, prays before receiving her groom.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Bride Yesmin, 22, prays before receiving her groom.
The International Organisation for Migration has found that camp children as young as 11 are getting married, often forced by their parents.
Marrying off a daughter is one less mouth to feed and early marriage is a common cultural practice among Rohingya Muslims. Other children as young as seven are working for paltry pay as maids and nannies for Bangladesh families, and on farms, construction sites and fishing boats.
In 281 child-friendly spaces set up by aid agencies throughout the camps, children have made crayon drawings depicting in chilling detail events they have witnessed in Rakhine, such as bodies in the streets, helicopter gunships and the arc of bullets.
Mothers at a Red Cross field hospital in Kutupalong.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Mothers at a Red Cross field hospital in Kutupalong.
"I lost four of my classmates and one of my teachers was killed too," a 16-year-boy said after presenting a drawing.
Rohingya are showing incredible resilience in the world's largest concentration of refugees.
Myanmar soldiers beat 21-year-old mother of two Shosma Begum when they attacked her village and killed her husband.
Villages in Maungdaw burn in September.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Villages in Maungdaw burn in September.
She can only move in extreme pain from a back injury but pushes herself to cut firewood and queue for food handouts.
"I do as much as I can," she says. "But it is difficult to feed my children."
Squatting before a cooking fire, Shosma gives a detailed account of how soldiers slashed and killed people in her village before setting houses on fire. She saw body parts being put in sacks. Many of the Rohingya we spoke with have similar shocking stories which are impossible to independently verify.

A VICIOUS CYCLE
Myanmar has banned United Nations and human rights researchers and journalists entering Rakhine.
But these are poor, uneducated villagers from an impoverished part of the country (also called Burma) that has been largely closed to the outside world for half a century. Under repeated questioning their stories are unbending.
Debra Blackmore, an Australian doctor working with the Red Cross supervising mobile health clinics for the camps, says it has been devastating to see families sitting on roadsides in monsoon rains with little but the clothes on their backs, after fleeing Rakhine.
"I have not seen anything like it before in my life," says Blackmore, who has worked in disaster and conflict areas across the world. "It is like the images I saw on television of Rwanda."
Robert Onus, from Doctors Without Borders, says after several months in the camps the refugees' health is deteriorating further.
"People have reached their limits. There is a vicious cycle where the vulnerable are becoming increasingly vulnerable," he says, pointing to the camp conditions.
Diseases eradicated in most other countries are now appearing.
The World Health Organisation says more than 110 suspected cases of the vaccine-preventable and deadly diphtheria have been clinically diagnosed.
"These cases could be just the tip of the iceberg," says Navaratnasamy Paranietharan, the WHO representative in Bangladesh.
"This is an extremely vulnerable population with low vaccination coverage and living conditions that could be a breeding ground for infectious diseases like cholera, measles, rubella and diphtheria."
A cholera outbreak would be devastating.
Temporary toilets are overflowing and there are no private places. The stench of excreta is everywhere.
Aid agencies say while more than half a million refugees have received limited aid so far, 173,000 of them have not received full food rations, 200,000 require emergency shelter assistance and 120,000 pregnant and lactating women require nutritional support.
Mark Handby, a public health expert from Port Fairy in Victoria working for the Red Cross, says one of the biggest problems is a lack of water as temporary hand pumps run dry.
Some deeper bores have drawn good-quality water but he fears others being sunk may be salt-contaminated.
Handby has seen refugees drinking putrid water from ponds in paddy fields and also says the situation "ticks every box for a worst-case scenario".
Aid agencies estimate the number of pregnancies could be as high as 10 per cent of the camp population, many of them as a result of rapes.
BRILLIANT EFFORTS
Myanmar denies that any sexual assaults took place in Rakhine State.
In a country where life for the ethnic minority has been made unbearable for decades, one Rakhine official told reporters the Rohingya are too "ugly" to be raped and state media has described them as "human fleas".
Myanmar's military commander, Min Aung Hlaing, has honoured "brilliant efforts to restore regional peace, security" in so-called "clearance operations" against insurgents in Rakhine.
A supposed internal investigation conducted by the military found that troops fired "not a single shot" on civilians and that "all security members strictly abided by the orders".
Frail, bent of back and near-deaf 105-year-old Jorina Khatun was piggybacked for days to reach Bangladesh after her village was attacked. "She didn't want to come. We had to force her," says her 55-year-old son, Mahmud Hossain, after receiving treatment at a Red Cross mobile clinic.
The only other time Jorina has left Rakhine, she says, was when the British and Japanese were fighting each other in Myanmar in World War II.
More than 1 million Rohingya have suffered longstanding discrimination in Myanmar, which sees them as "Bengali" interlopers, even though they have lived there for generations.
Jorina's parents and their parents before them were born in Myanmar but she is denied citizenship.
Jorina Khatun, 105, with her son Mahmud Hossain.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Jorina Khatun, 105, with her son Mahmud Hossain.
I ask Jorina if she still wants to go back.
"They have driven us away and I will only go back if we are accepted as Rohingya," she replies.
The grim reality is that the vast majority of Rohingya are not going to return to their homeland in the foreseeable future, creating grave political and security risks, including the potential for radicalisation of Muslims and recruitment for transnational terrorism.

Researchers from the International Crisis Group (ICG) say organisers and fighters from Arakan Salvation Army, which attacked police posts in Rakhine in August 25, are now in the camps, indicating they may shift to cross-border missions, which could escalate tensions between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
AN UNEASY REFUGE
Radicals are watching what is happening in these camps.
"The plight of Rohingya has captured the attention of the Muslim world, becoming a cause celebre like perhaps no other since Kosovo," the ICG said in a report last week.
One Rohingya approached me in a market and said: "If we do not get citizenship, we will go there and fight and destroy them all." Rumours are circulating about smugglers touting for passengers for a new wave of boat people.
International agencies also fear tensions could eventually erupt between Rohingya and local Bangladeshis who have so far been remarkably welcoming to their fellow Muslims.
As the camps begin stirring before sunrise, Mohammad Anis, a 54-year-old English teacher, lifts an old wooden radio to his ear, hungry for news from Rakhine.
A tall, proud father of five wearing a white Muslim skull cap, Mohammad says Rohingya have basic demands that must be met before they return.
"We must be treated with respect and acceptance," he says in a speech for our camera.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Mohammad Anis says Rohingya have basic demands that must be met before they return to Myanmar.
"The Burmese planned to drive us away. How? By killing us and prohibiting us from marrying and having children. It is genocide," he says. "Living here in the camps we have good days and bad days but if we are forced to go back to Burma we won't go back … even if we are killed or burned here, that would be better than going back without justice."
Across the maze of camps, another teacher Abdul Majed, 38, also insists on making a speech for the camera to appeal to the world to help Rohingya.
And still they come, exhausted, hauling bags of meagre possessions and clutching infants, thousands of them every week, in the fastest refugee exodus since the Rwandan genocide.
Mohammad Anis brings radio news from Myanmar.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA
Mohammad Anis brings radio news from Myanmar.
 
 
 
Soon the depopulation of Rohingya from northern Rakhine will be complete.

To read more and view the video: click here.


Silhouetted by a full mo
on, nine months pregnant and mother-of-two Shajida Akter and nine family members cross the Naf river, reaching Shah Porir Dwip, an island on the southeastern tip of Bangladesh, which means they are safe.
There is no rejoicing, though.
KATE GERAGHTY/FAIRFAX AUSTRALIA

With the sun now risen, they shuffle towards a Bangladesh border post and an official registers their names and asks why they have come.
Behind her full-face hijab, tears well in Shajida's eyes and she says men dragged away her husband. She believes he has been killed.
"Because all the people have been fleeing to Bangladesh, we decided to come too, even if we die trying," she says.
Her 20-year-old cousin, Nurul Salam, tosses a sack containing the family's only possessions onto his shoulder.
"What the military is doing there is just too much," he says, walking off into an uncertain future.
 - Sydney Morning Herald

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