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Rohingya girls as young as 12 compelled to marry just to get food

Allocation of food rations by household means refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar are marrying off children as young as 12 to create new family circles

Young Rohingya girls who have fled Myanmar are being forced to marry when they reach Bangladesh simply to secure more food for themselves and their families.

With UN World Food Programme rations allocated by household, families are marrying off girls as young as 12 to reduce the number of mouths to feed and create new households with food quotas of their own, the Guardian has learned.

More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar since the military launched its first round of “clearance operations” in October last year. About 600,000 have been displaced since the second wave in August, which the UN has condemned as “ethnic cleansing”. Security forces have been accused of mass rape and killing.

Medics in Bangladesh say young girls have been a particular target of sexual violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

But in the camps of Cox’s Bazar, they continue to face violence in the form of early marriage, which causes physical and psychological damage.

“I wasn’t mature when I got married,” said Anwara, who fled Rakhine after the military burned her home. Aged 14, she was married within weeks of arriving in Bangladesh and has just had her first baby.

“I couldn’t understand what had happened, and got weak and didn’t eat anything. I didn’t tell anyone and no one knew I’d conceived. Girls don’t become smart till four or five years after they get their menstruation. That’s when we become strong and understand things in life and have a chance to grow tall and beautiful.

“I wish I could have spent some time without a husband and baby. Then life would have been beautiful.”

The Guardian spoke to more than a dozen teenage girls who had either been made to marry in the camps or whose parents were actively looking for husbands for them.

While early marriage is practised in Rohingya communities in Myanmar, the girls said food rations were a major factor in the decision to get married in the camps. The allocation of 25kg of rice every two weeks is based on an average family size of five, but many families are larger.

This 15-year-old girl was married to a stranger less than two months after reaching Bangladesh following clearance operations in Rakhine state. Photograph: Antolín Avezuela

Marium, 14, arrived in Bangladesh in September. She was married three weeks later. “Everything was burning in the village. As we ran out the people at the front were all shot,” she said.

“I have no father and I was a great burden on my mother so it’s better I got married. Of course if my mother had the ability to feed me I would be happy to stay single.”

Muhammad Hassen has just arranged the marriage of his 14-year-old daughter, Arafa. “We have 10 family members in total, seven daughters, and we get 25kg of rice [every two weeks]. This is not enough for a family of 10,” he said.

“Of course if I’d stayed in Rakhine I would wait to marry my daughter. I was a farmer with three acres of land. I [would have fed her] with what I have in my house or extended family and neighbours would help. Here we can’t do that.”

Arafa had not yet met her husband – who was “very much older than me, about 20” – but she had seen him in the distance and believed he was an “honourable man”.

“I hope it will be good being a wife,” she said. “In my house I do everything for my parents and my young sisters, so it is my habit.”

Only one of the girls interviewed knew their husband before their wedding day, and all the girls who had already married said they knew nothing about sex.

“My parents gave me to my husband because they couldn’t afford to feed me. When I got married, I just thought my husband would feed me, I didn’t understand what he would do [in terms of intimate relations],” said Fatima, who was 12 when she got married.

Mohamad, a camp mazi – community leader – said parents don’t want to marry off their daughters, but “they need to eat”.

WFP said for the latest round of food distribution it had increased its rations for families of more than eight people. A spokesperson initially said the link between child marriage and rations was unlikely. But after hearing the Guardian’s findings, the organisation said it would follow up on the concerns with other UN agencies involved in child protection.

Habibur Rahman, programme head at Bangladesh charity Brac, who works with refugee families, said girls being married off for food was “a deep concern”.

“A household with more than eight members gets two ration cards but the household with seven members is getting one card. As a result, there is a risk of child marriage as a girl child can be married off and that would mean more food per ration,” he said.

“Girls and women in the refugee camps are at especially high risk of child marriage and other forms of violence. Child marriage is already common among the Rohingya, but poverty and insecurity are pushing many displaced families to marry off their daughters even earlier. The government and NGOs must do more to address these risks and take girls into account when planning their response to this crisis.”

Lakshmi Sundaram, executive director of Girls Not Brides, said child marriage had “devastating” consequences including early pregnancy, physical and sexual violence, and an increased likelihood of poverty.

“We cannot ignore child marriage in crisis settings. Governments and NGOs need to pay special attention to the risk of child marriage when they are planning their responses to humanitarian emergencies. That means putting a special focus on safety and access to quality education for girls. It also means working with girls and women from the early stages of a crisis, so they can explain their situations first-hand,” she said.

Already married and pregnant with her first child when she fled Myanmar, this 15-year-old was widowed after her husband fell ill during their escape. Photograph: Antolín Avezuela

Girls and their families said it was easier for them to get married in Bangladesh than in Myanmar. The legal age for girls to wed in Bangladesh is 18, but the country has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world.

For some parents the lax enforcement of marriage laws in Bangladesh is an opportunity. Rosia, 15, said she was married after a woman came to her family’s shelter and suggested if they could not afford to feed Rosia they should marry her to her son. “If my parents agreed, I had to agree,” she said.

But the marriage was a scam. Two months after the wedding it emerged the man was not the woman’s son and started demanding money from the family. When they were unable to pay he disappeared.

“I have one small boy and six girls. In [Myanmar], under-18 marriage is not allowed and we needed military permission and that cost a great deal of money. This was a great opportunity – a chance not available in [Myanmar],” says her father, Muhammed.

Muhammed is determined to find husbands for all his daughters. “Early marriage is not good according to my knowledge – but it is good for me. Because I cannot feed them, one by one I will have to give them husbands.”

Meanwhile, a panel of UN women’s rights experts has responded to mounting evidence that national security forces have committed acts of sexual violence against Rohingya women by asking the Myanmar government to report cases within six months.

The request, known as an exceptional report, is only the fourth of its kind since the UN committee on the elimination of discrimination against women held its first session in 1982.

“We are very cautious and we apply very strict criteria when we decide to go that route, and usually we have different ways of following up on a dialogue,” said committee member Nahla Haidar. “We have had reports of sexual violence, rape, torture, mutilation that women were subjected to. We really felt compelled.”

Such requests occur only in response to “grave and systematic violations”, said Haidar, who added: “We never abuse this procedure.”

  • Some names have been changed to protect identities. Fiona MacGregor travelled with Girls Not Brides. Additional reporting by Rebecca Ratcliffe

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/30/young-rohingya-girls-bangladesh-compelled-marry-food-rations

 

 

 

 

 

Could Aung San Suu Kyi face Rohingya genocide charges?

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, is determined that the perpetrators of the horrors committed against the Rohingya face justice.

He’s the head of the UN’s watchdog for human rights across the world, so his opinions carry weight.

It could go right to the top – he doesn’t rule out the possibility that civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the head of the armed forces Gen Aung Min Hlaing, could find themselves in the dock on genocide charges some time in the future.

Earlier this month, Mr Zeid told the UN Human Rights Council that the widespread and systematic nature of the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar (also called Burma) meant that genocide could not be ruled out.

“Given the scale of the military operation, clearly these would have to be decisions taken at a high level,” said the high commissioner, when we met at the UN headquarters in Geneva for BBC Panorama.

That said, genocide is one of those words that gets bandied about a lot. It sounds terrible – the so-called “crime of crimes”. Very few people have ever been convicted of it.

The crime was defined after the Holocaust. Member countries of the newly founded United Nations signed a convention, defining genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a particular group.

It is not Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein’s job to prove acts of genocide have been committed – only a court can do that. But he has called for an international criminal investigation into the perpetrators of what he has called the “shockingly brutal attacks” against the Muslim ethnic group who are mainly from northern Rakhine in Myanmar.

But the high commissioner recognised it would be a tough case to make: “For obvious reasons, if you’re planning to commit genocide you don’t commit it to paper and you don’t provide instructions.”

“The thresholds for proof are high,” he said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me in the future if a court were to make such a finding on the basis of what we see.”

By the beginning of December, nearly 650,000 Rohingya – around two thirds of the entire population – had fled Myanmar after a wave of attacks led by the army that began in late August.

Hundreds of villages were burned and thousands are reported to have been killed.

There is evidence of terrible atrocities being committed: massacres, murders and mass rapes – as I heard myself when I was in the refugee camps as this crisis began.

What clearly rankles the UN human rights chief is that he had urged Ms Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar, to take action to protect the Rohingya six months before the explosion of violence in August.

He said he spoke to her on the telephone when his office published a report in February documenting appalling atrocities committed during an episode of violence that began in October 2016.

“I appealed to her to bring these military operations to an end,” he told me. “I appealed to her emotional standing… to do whatever she could to bring this to a close, and to my great regret it did not seem to happen.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rohingya Muslims displaced from Tula Toli village in Rakhine State gave disturbing accounts

Ms Suu Kyi’s power over the army is limited, but Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein believes she should have done more to try and stop the military campaign.

He criticised her for failing to use the term “Rohingya”. “To strip their name from them is dehumanising to the point where you begin to believe that anything is possible,” he said – powerful language for a top UN official.

He thought Myanmar’s military was emboldened when the international community took no action against them after the violence in 2016. “I suppose that they then drew a conclusion that they could continue without fear,” he said.

“What we began to sense was that this was really well thought out and planned,” he told me.

The Myanmar government has said the military action was a response to terrorist attacks in August which killed 12 members of the security forces.

But BBC Panorama has gathered evidence that shows that preparations for the continued assault on the Rohingya began well before that.

We show that Myanmar had been training and arming local Buddhists. Within weeks of last year’s violence the government made an offer: “Every Rakhine national wishing to protect their state will have the chance to become part of the local armed police.”

“This was a decision made to effectively perpetrate atrocity crimes against the civilian population,” said Matthew Smith, chief executive of the human rights organisation Fortify Rights which has been investigating the build-up to this year’s violence.

That view is borne out by refugees in the vast camps in Myanmar who saw these volunteers in action, attacking their Rohingya neighbours and burning down their homes.

“They were just like the army, they had the same kind of weapons”, said Mohammed Rafique, who ran a successful business in Myanmar. “They were local boys, we knew them. When the army was burning our houses, torturing us, they were there.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who is burning down Rohingya villages?

Meanwhile the Rohingya were getting more vulnerable in other ways.

By the summer food shortages were widespread in north Rakhine – and the government tightened the screws. The programme has learnt that from mid-August the authorities had cut off virtually all food and other aid to north Rakhine.

And the army brought in reinforcements. On 10 August, two weeks before the militant attacks, it was reported that a battalion had been flown in.

The UN human rights representative for Myanmar was so concerned she issued a public warning, urging restraint from the Myanmar authorities.

But when Rohingya militants launched attacks on 30 police posts and an army base, the military response was huge, systematic and devastating.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rohingya refugees tell the BBC of “house by house” killings

The BBC asked Aung San Suu Kyi and the head of the Myanmar armed forces for a response. But neither of them has replied.

Almost four months on from those attacks and Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein is concerned the repercussions of the violence are not yet over. He fears this “could just be the opening phases of something much worse”.

He worries jihadi groups could form in the huge refugee camps in Bangladesh and launch attacks in Myanmar, perhaps even targeting Buddhist temples. The result could be what he called a “confessional confrontation” – between Buddhists and Muslims.

It is a frightening thought, as the high commissioner acknowledged, but one he believes Myanmar isn’t taking seriously enough.

“I mean the stakes are so enormous,” he said. “This sort of flippant manner by which they respond to the serious concerns of the international community is really alarming.”

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42335018