NY Times story of a Rohingya mother's anguished choice to leave a child behind while fleeing Myanmar
The New York Times has recently covered the story of a
Rohingya woman who fled Myanmar. It has subsequently been posted in the Malaya
Mail, from which I have copied the story in full, which you can read below. Or
you can read by clicking the link here: http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/lost-in-diplomatic-wrangling-a-mothers-anguished-choice-to-leave-one-child
GELUGOR, July 7 — Carrying one child
in her arm, a second on her back and holding the hand of a third, Hasinah Izhar
waded waist-deep through a mangrove swamp into the Bay of Bengal, toward a
fishing boat bobbing in the dusk.
“Troops are coming, troops are
coming,” the smuggler said. “Get on the boat quickly.”
If she was going to change her mind,
she would have to do it now.
Izhar, 33, had reached the muddy
shore after sneaking down the dirt paths and around the fish ponds of western
Myanmar, where she and about 1 million other members of the Rohingya minority
are stateless, shunned and persecuted for their Muslim faith.
She had signed up for passage to
Malaysia, but knew that the voyage would be treacherous, that even if she
survived, the smugglers would demand ransom before letting her and her children
go, and that they sometimes beat, tortured or sold into slavery those who could
not pay.
Her husband, who had raised shrimp
and cattle, had been among tens of thousands who made the journey two years
earlier, after Buddhist mobs rampaged through villages like their own, burning
houses and killing at least 200 people. He had warned her not to follow,
telling her that the trip was too dangerous and too expensive.
But as she reached the wooden skiff
that would take them on the first leg of a weekslong journey, one terrible fact
weighed heaviest: She had left behind her oldest child, a 13-year-old boy named
Jubair.
Since 2012, tens of thousands of
Rohingya have fled Myanmar, where they are officially considered intruders. The
exodus exploded into a regional crisis in May after smugglers abandoned
thousands of them at sea, leaving them adrift with little food or water and no
country willing to take them in.
Amid a global outcry, Malaysia and
Indonesia eventually agreed to accept the migrants, temporarily.
But lost in the diplomatic wrangling
over the fate of the Rohingya are the anguished choices faced by the families
who leave and the harrowing personal consequences they must endure.
Izhar knew it would cost as much as
US$2,000 (about RM7635) just to bring her three youngest children to Malaysia.
Taking Jubair could double the smugglers’ price, and she had only US$500 from
selling their house, a bamboo and mud-daub hut in the village of Thayet Oak.
The eighth of 10 children raised by
a farming couple, she had spent her entire life in the countryside around the
village. She was married there at 18, and lost her first husband to a sudden
illness.
She relied on help from relatives to
support her two gangly boys, Jubair and Junaid. A few years later, she married
again and had another boy, Sufaid, and then a girl, Parmin.
It was while she was pregnant with
Parmin that her husband fled to Malaysia.
Buddhist militants, incensed by
rumours that Muslims had raped a Buddhist woman, had attacked villages like
Thayet Oak across Rakhine state, the coastal region home to most of Myanmar’s
Rohingya. The police and the army stood by and did nothing.
Worried that he would be arrested
and beaten like some of his friends, Izhar’s husband, Dil Muhammad Rahman, went
into hiding, making fleeting visits home in the dead of night. Then in late
2012, he disappeared, not calling to tell her that he had gone to Malaysia
until three months after he reached there.
Violence against the Rohingya flared
again last year. Izhar heard rumours of children being shot. She saw police
officers break a man’s hand and strike another in the head with clubs, leaving
him bleeding and unconscious.
Women living alone were especially
vulnerable, and when night fell, she kept the house dark and hushed her
children. “I didn’t even light a lamp,” she said.
Fear was a constant. By December,
when word of ships waiting in the Bay of Bengal spread through the villages,
she could not wait any longer.
“How can I stay here?” she asked.
“The old, the young, everyone has to keep watch on the village every night to
protect the women. All the women are going to Malaysia, so I will go to
Malaysia, too.”
Now, as she heaved her children into
the boat in the darkness, her mind was a jumble of relief, fear and regret.
Malaysia is a Muslim nation, she
knew, and she believed she and her children would be safe there.
But she had not told her husband
they were coming. She hoped he would still be happy to see them, and that he
would find the money to pay the smugglers.
“I had to take the boat full of
sadness and fear in my heart,” she said. “My husband wouldn’t let anyone kill
us. He would rescue us somehow.”
Most of all, though, she was
tormented by the thought of Jubair.
What would become of him, alone in
Thayet Oak, exposed to the very dangers she was running from? What would have
become of her other children if they had stayed?
When it was time to leave, Jubair
was off with friends in another village, and there was no time to think. She
gathered up the other children, packed a bundle with a few changes of clothes
for the children and three plastic bottles of water, and fled.
Now, as the shoreline receded in the
distance, she wished she had had a chance to explain her decision to Jubair,
and to hug him goodbye.
“Some words came to my mind,” she
recalled later. “If I can stay alive, I will bring him to Malaysia. I felt very
sad to leave my boy behind, but it would be better for the family if we left to
live or die somewhere else. We couldn’t stay.”
After a few hours, the passengers
were transferred to a motorboat, which bounced through the dark, choppy sea,
making her nauseated and later transferred again, to a ship somewhere in the
Bay of Bengal.
Izhar and her children huddled with
a dozen women and their children on the deck. Men and teenage boys were led to
the hold.
Most of the 250 or so passengers
spoke Rohingya, while some sounded as if they were from Bangladesh.
In the morning, the crew handed out
the first meal she and her children would have since leaving their village two
days earlier: lumps of cold, precooked rice and pieces of palm sugar. Izhar,
seasick, had trouble holding it down. She vomited repeatedly.
“I couldn’t sleep for six days and
six nights,” she said. “One son was on my right side, one son was on my left
side, and the small one was on my chest. We couldn’t move around. We just sat
and waited, and I tried to keep the children from wandering around. What if
they fell overboard? Nobody would pull them out.”
It was December, and the small
Rohingya family had become so much cargo in the growing, multinational people-smuggling
businesses.
Smugglers took around 58,000 people,
mostly from Myanmar and Bangladesh, on the journey last year through the Bay of
Bengal and the Andaman Sea, often via southern Thailand and then on to
Malaysia, according to the International Organisation for Migration. They took
25,000 more people in the first three months of this year.
Many Rohingya ended up trading one
nightmare for another. Some were confined for weeks to fetid, cramped holds
reeking of vomit and excrement. Some were detained in prisonlike way stations
in southern Thailand, subject to beatings and torture as the smugglers extorted
payments from their families.
Hundreds died during the journey
each year, from starvation, dehydration and, at times, brutality. As the ship
lurched southeast, Izhar began to grasp the perils. The women were generally
spared beatings, but men were punched, shoved and slapped if they irritated the
crew, she said.
Late one afternoon, the ship erupted
in shouting and screaming when some of the crew members prepared to sling
overboard the inert body of an older man, whose hands and legs had been bound
with rope.
“He looked like he was dead, or
maybe very close to it,” Izhar said. “But all of a sudden he started jerking
around and twisting and shouting, and then everyone was shouting, ‘He’s alive!
He’s alive!’”
The crew beat the man into
submission and took him below deck. Izhar did not know what happened to him
after that.
The transaction
After about a week at sea, Izhar’s
family reached a much larger ship, where they joined hundreds of other
migrants. The crew included people from Thailand, as well as some other
Rohingya, and they spoke as if the ship was somewhere off Thailand. She and the
children were ordered down to a stinking, crowded hold three levels below the
top deck.
Soon after the passengers boarded,
the smugglers demanded that they hand over the phone numbers of family members
and relatives who were expected to pay for the journey.
Izhar pulled her husband’s number
from her tattered bundle of belongings, and in the morning crew members led her
away to call him.
One of the crew told her husband
that his wife was in Thailand. That was the first he knew that she had left
Myanmar.
Izhar got on the phone and told him
the smugglers were demanding about US$2,100 in return for releasing her and the
three children.
“I don’t have the money to pay for
you!” he shouted angrily, and demanded to know why she had left Jubair behind.
It is not uncommon for Rohingya
women joining their husbands abroad to do so without telling them. If a woman
told her husband, “most of the time the husband would not allow her to
leave,” said Chris Lewa, a Rohingya rights advocate based in Bangkok. The men
fear that if their families join them, they will be saddled with more expenses
for a larger apartment or an extra room.
Nor is it uncommon for migrants to
be separated from their spouses or children for long periods.
Izhar and her children stayed in the
hold for weeks while their fate was negotiated. Twice a day, they received
water and food: usually a scoop of rice with lentils or dried fish so putrid
that she could barely swallow it, although the famished children wolfed down
their servings.
The smugglers kept up the pressure.
One whipped Izhar several times on the back and waist with a piece of heavy
plastic tubing, and they called her husband repeatedly.
“Don’t you want your family
released?” one asked him. “If you don’t they will be thrown into the water.”
Haggling ensued. The smugglers’
price dropped to US$1,700.
Rahman begged everyone he knew for
help: relatives, friends, friends of friends. “I started weeping; I would
crouch at their feet,” he said. He told them: “For the sake of my children, I
will pay you back. If I cannot, I will be a slave for you.”
Over three weeks after the
bargaining began, the money arrived, most of it from an uncle.
Three days later, Izhar and her
three children boarded a motorboat with dozens of other migrants, and soon
anchored off a beach in northern Malaysia. Most Rohingya enter Malaysia after
trekking through the jungle of southern Thailand. But Izhar ended her voyage
much as she had started it: trudging through the muddy edge of the sea as she
waded ashore.
“I felt happy,” she said. “I thought
how much trouble our journey had been, and now it was nearly over.”
From the nearest city, Sittwe, the
capital of Rakhine State, the village of Thayet Oak is a 45-minute ferry ride,
then a four-hour drive along rutted dirt roads.
The first villager who appeared
there was asked if he knew a 13-year-old boy named Jubair. “Yes,” he said, and
pointed down a dusty dirt road. At the end of the road, a boy in a dirty orange
shirt was carrying two aluminum water jugs on the ends of a bamboo pole.
“That’s him.”
Everyone in Thayet Oak seems to know
Jubair, the boy who was left behind.
In a dark room of his cousin’s
bamboo house, where he sometimes sleeps, he sat on the dirt floor and patiently
answered questions.
Where is your home?
“My mother sold the house to pay for
the boat fees.”
Why did your mother leave without
you?
“I didn’t know about it. She could
not find me. She could not tell me. I was in another person’s house. I was
lost.”
Where is your father?
“He died.”
Of what?
“I do not know. I was young.”
Are you going to school?
“I have not been enrolled this
year.”
What do you do?
“I work at a person’s house. I fetch
water for him.”
Are you happy doing this work?
“No.”
Do you want to go to school?
“Yes.”
Six months after his mother left, he
remained baffled as to why she did not take him along.
“I think maybe she didn’t have
enough money,” he said. “I don’t know exactly.”
Thayet Oak means mango orchard in
Burmese, but the reality is less idyllic.
Rohingya are denied citizenship by
the Myanmar government, and the residents of Thayet Oak must seek permission
before leaving the village, even to collect firewood in the nearby jungle. At a
guard post outside the village, police officers watch everyone who comes in and
out.
The village has no sanitation,
postal service, electricity, computers or a single television set. “There are
very few jobs here,” Dil Muhammad, a village elder, said. “People feel
trapped.”
Hundreds of young men have left.
Villagers are inured to departures and the reality that those who leave almost
never return.
In early May, a shrimp farmer, Salim
Ullah, noticed Jubair sitting in a bamboo shack that serves as the local
grocery store.
“When I asked people, they said he
has no father. His mother left already,” Ullah said. “I asked where does he
stay? They said he just stays on the street.”
Jubair’s bed had been the sandy,
orange-brown dirt road.
Ullah said he had taken Jubair into
his home as a servant, giving him work fetching water for the equivalent of
US$9 (about RM34) a month. Jubair brought along his only belongings: three
tattered shirts and two sarongs.
“He can stay for as long as he
wants,” Ullah said.
The bamboo and thatch house is
packed with Ullah’s family, including his five children, his sister and her two
children.
Jubair fetches water a dozen times
in the morning and again in the evening. He walks barefoot — he does not own
shoes — several hundred yards down a dirt path that leads to a well, fills two
dented metal jugs and walks back, balancing them on either end of a bamboo
pole.
When he is not working, he tries to
be a normal child. He plays with friends, a mischievous smile occasionally
crossing his face.
He is a bright boy who quickly
grasped the questions of visitors. But he cannot read or write and stared
blankly when asked what job he aspired to have. “I want an education,” he said.
Jubair has spoken to his mother six
or seven times since her departure. She calls a neighbour’s phone, and the
neighbours summon him.
What did your mother say to you the
last time you spoke?
“She said, ‘Son, don’t cry, don’t be
sad, stay well.’”
Do you miss your mother?
He could not speak, and started to
cry.
Two days after she landed in
Malaysia, more than a month after her journey began, Izhar was driven to Penang
Island, where her husband was working on a building site. Rahman beamed as he
held Parmin for the first time.
But there were also pained questions
as he looked at his emaciated family.
“How could you come to Malaysia with
such small children?” he said. “Why did you leave Jubair behind?”
At least 75,000 Rohingya live in
Malaysia as registered refugees or unregistered migrants, according to the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees. Rohingya groups say the unregistered number is
much higher.
Life is safer in Malaysia, and there
are more potential jobs than in Rakhine state. But under Malaysian law, neither
refugees nor unregistered migrants can legally work. They receive no welfare,
and most of the men struggle to pick up informal jobs as day laborers. Their
children cannot attend government schools, and they must vie for the limited
places in crowded, makeshift schools supported by charities and international
aid.
“We are illegal here, too,” Izhar
said. “We belong to nowhere. On the ship, we thought we would have a peaceful
and comfortable life in Malaysia. Now after arriving in Malaysia we face more
hardships.”
The crisis at sea has subsided for
now. Smugglers are lying low and the monsoon season has deterred escapes by
sea. But experts say both the smuggling climate and the weather will change in
a few months, and the exodus will resume.
Nearly six months after her voyage,
Izhar and her family share a small, two-story house with 13 other people,
mostly Rohingya, in Gelugor, a district of Penang that is a mosaic of
middle-class homes and cheap housing, much of it occupied by migrants.
She rises at 6.30am to pray; cook
breakfast for her family, often rice and an omelet; prepare her son Junaid for
a school for refugees; and tidy the cramped bedroom where the couple and three
children sleep on a tattered, full-size mattress.
Rahman walks to a spot beside an
expressway where he waits for building and maintenance contractors looking for
workers. If he is lucky, he can earn US$8 to US$16 for a day’s work, carrying
bricks, cutting grass, or other menial work.
But most days he comes home
empty-handed. He has fallen three months behind on the rent for the room, about
US$94 a month, and faces eviction. There is also pressure to repay more than
US$1,000 he still owes his friends and relatives, the money he borrowed to pay
the smugglers.
“People I owe money to always call
and ask me to pay their money back,” he said. “If I’d known what the situation
was really like here, I probably wouldn’t have left my country.”
Between household chores, Izhar
waits, consumed by doubt.
The hours and days blur together.
The clock on the bedroom wall has lost its hands, which have fallen to the
bottom of the glass case.
“As a mother, living without my
eldest son is emotional torment for me,” she said. “I wouldn’t dare bring my
son over on the same hard journey I took. But as a mother, I feel like bringing
my son back to me.”
Finally, Rahman returns. It was
another fruitless day of waiting for work.
He slumps on a couch in the garage.
A smile flashes across his face when Izhar brings out the two youngest children.
He hugs them and weeps quietly. —
The New York Times
- See more
at:
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/lost-in-diplomatic-wrangling-a-mothers-anguished-choice-to-leave-one-child#sthash.pDIKvGjr.dpuf
Comments
Post a Comment