NEW DELHI – At 15, Raheema left her home in Rakhine state in Myanmar,crossed two international borders and was sold to be married to a man inIndia just a few years younger than her father.
“He had asked the agent if I was married before. I was single so he boughtme for 20,000 Indian rupees (about $300). Married women go for 15,000rupees,” Raheema, who gave only her first name, told the Thomson ReutersFoundation.
“He was only slightly younger than my father… He would beat me up withelectrical wires and not let me leave, saying he had bought me,” saidRaheema, who now lives in a settlement in northern India housing RohingyaMuslims who have fled Myanmar.
Raheema’s husband let her leave last year after five years of abuse. Shewas five months pregnant with their second child.
In a burgeoning refugee crisis, about 660,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar’swestern Rakhine state across the border to Bangladesh since late August,when Rohingya militants attacked security posts and the army launched acounter-offensive.
They join tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims already in Bangladesh,while pockets of Rohingya communities are dotted across South Asia, havingescaped discrimination and persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has said the newarrivals – the majority of them women and children – are at risk of humantrafficking, as officials and aid workers struggle to cope with the influx.
Cases of men and women enslaved in bonded labour or trafficked for marriagehave also started to emerge in India after they managed to escape or wererescued and found their way to Rohingya settlements like the one in Nuh.
Rohingya started to migrate to India years ago and there are now close to40,000 Rohingya Muslims living in the country.
Raheema left her home in Myanmar, “surrounded by tall blades of grass andpaddy fields” to join her father in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in 2012.
“There was no food at home and my mother thought I would be better off if Ijoined my father,” said Raheema, now 22. “But my aunt at the camp sold meto the agent who told her he would get me married in India.”
“I was numb to the idea of marriage. I just followed the agent and reachedKolkata. I didn’t know any Indian language, but I thought I will be safe,”she said in fluent Hindi, from her home in Nuh in the northern Indian stateof Haryana.
Rohingya refugee women wait outside of a medical center at Jamtoli camp inCox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. (Reuters)Safety lessons
Bangladesh’s chaotic refugee camps are fertile territory for agents likethe one who bought and sold Raheema. The promise of marriage is a typicalway for traffickers operating in the camps to lure girls.
“Marriage is big for young girls and parents are agreeing to it becausethey see better economic stability (for their daughters),” said IffatNawaz, spokeswoman for aid and development organisation BRAC.
In December, BRAC volunteers started visiting young girls at the refugeesettlements in Cox’s Bazar to give them information and support on how tostay safe among so many strangers. “Many of these girls have never beenaround so many men. They are meeting a lot of new people,” said Nawaz.
The girls are trained over 12 sessions on signs they need to look out for -inappropriate touching, offers of money or food and shelter, and ways todifferentiate between genuine humanitarian workers and traffickers.
“There are enough incidents of girls going missing…They are beingtrafficked to India and Nepal. We launched this programme to reduce thatrisk,” Nawaz said.
A Rohingya woman gets medical checkup at Samaritan’s Purse diphtheriaclinic, Bangladesh. (Reuters)Identity
Across the border in India, cases like Raheema are gradually emerging.
Hasina Kharbhih, founder of anti-trafficking charity Impulse NGO Networkthat works in India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, said the group was working onreuniting 15 Rohingya girls in India with their families.
“These girls were trafficked and sold in India for sexual slavery or formarriage six to eight years ago. They are at government-run shelters now,”she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We have not succeeded in sending any of them back home as we are unable totrace their families in Myanmar.”
Kharbhih also received five cases in the last six months of families inBangladeshi refugee camps looking for girls they say were trafficked toIndia.
Campaigners say there are more cases of girls sold in India, but there arechallenges in identifying them.
“(It’s) because of the language issue – it is difficult to identify them asRohingya or Bangladeshi as the language is very similar,” said AdrianPhillips of Justice and Care, an anti-human trafficking NGO.
About 17,000 Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers are registered with U.N.refugee agency UNHCR in India and many, like Raheema, use the UNHCR’sletter acknowledging their application for a refugee card as proof ofidentity.
Officials at UNHCR, however, said neither they nor their partnerorganizations had recorded cases similar to Raheema’s.
“Based on information available with UNHCR, there is no record of a patternof trafficking for marriages in the Rohingya refugee community in India,”said UNHCR’s Ipshita Sengupta by email.
Raheema now lives with her two children in a slum in Nuh, in a hut made oftin and cardboard with plastic sheeting for a roof. She shows the smallspace she has created for a clay stove to cook food.
She is in touch with her mother, who is still in Myanmar.
“I work as a maid servant here and earn 1,200 rupees,” she said. “But whowill feed me if I go back to my mother?”