Terror in Rohingya refugee camp as boys kidnapped to fight in Myanmar

This article was originally published by Radio Free Asia and is reprinted with permission.

The boy in the photo looks serious, pious and so very young.

Muhammad often stares at this snapshot of his kid brother, Farhad. It’s one of the few pictures he has of the 13-year-old, who has been missing for months.

In May, Farhad was abducted while coming home from his school, located inside Bangladesh’s sprawling Balukhali refugee camp. (Both brothers’ names along with those of other camp residents have been changed to protect their safety.) Farhad and his four brothers had lived in the camp since August 2017 after fleeing a bloody military crackdown in neighboring Myanmar. 

“I’m not just like his brother,” Muhammad, 26, told Radio Free Asia in June. “I’m like his father; he’s like my son.” 

In the weeks after Farhad’s disappearance, a desperate Muhammad pieced together some of his brother’s movements through a handful of phone calls with him. But there have been far more questions than answers. 

While Muhammad didn’t know who exactly kidnapped Farhad, the camp in Cox’s Bazar is overrun by gangs. Several of these have been abducting Rohingya refugees and smuggling them back across the border to fight in the war raging inside Myanmar.

Along with other forms of violence, abductions have long plagued the camps. Men and women are trafficked for labor or sex work, leaders are abducted as punishment for their advocacy, and sometimes refugees are kidnapped simply in order to extort funds from their family. 

But starting earlier this year, a different form of kidnapping became common. Facing mounting battlefield losses, Myanmar’s military government announced in February that it would begin enforcing a long-dormant conscription law. In Rakhine state, where the junta is fighting a number of resistance groups, its efforts to add soldiers have not stopped at the border. Just to the north, the Cox’s Bazar camps, with their large, trapped refugee population and entrenched criminal enterprises, appear to have become feeder lots for the military — and also for its opposing forces.

In their phone calls, Farhad told Muhammad that he had been smuggled into Rakhine state and taken south to Buthidaung. Later, he was handed over to the Myanmar military, which placed him in a training camp with about 40 other Rohingya men and boys. For the first two weeks, Farhad was given arms training, but eventually, he was pulled out of formal training and ordered to assist with cooking and running errands for soldiers, he told his brother on the phone. 

“The abduction and forced conscription in Myanmar and in the camps — it’s one of those things that’s so horrific that even though everything is already so terrible for them … here things are getting worse again,” said Jessica Olney, an independent analyst who has covered the Rohingya refugee crisis for years and in May published a paper for the United States Institute of Peace on conditions inside the camp.

Kidnappings like Farhad’s have changed the contours of life in the refugee camps, instilling a new form of terror among a deeply traumatized population. Shops are staying closed, as are doors. Roads that were once crowded with children playing and young men milling around have gone quiet. The appearance of an outsider brings only looks of distrust. Many families have taken to hiding their sons, brothers and nephews.

Since Farhad’s abduction, his classmates have lived in fear of becoming the next victim, according to Muhammad. “Most of the students are afraid,” he said. “But it’s kind of a new normal now.”

‘Now our own people torture us’

An ethnic Muslim minority, Rohingya have long faced violence and persecution in their native Myanmar, where they are not legally recognized as citizens. For decades, many who fled wound up inside the dozens of camps in Cox’s Bazar – a city on the coast of Bangladesh named for an 18th century British colonial who managed refugee resettlements.

The bloodshed reached a crescendo in August 2017, when a Myanmar military campaign of rape, arson and murder sent more than 740,000 Rohingya fleeing into Bangladesh. The U.S., U.N. and others have classified those attacks a genocide.

Today, more than 1 million Rohingya live inside these tightly packed camps of tarps and bamboo where Muhammad and his family have tried to eke out an existence.

But the Bangladeshi government still views the Rohingya refugees as temporary residents and conditions inside the camps are bleak.  

Landslides and fires regularly kill while a lack of sanitation and clean water means scabies, cholera and other diseases are disturbingly common. Schooling and healthcare are hard to come by, there’s not enough food, and almost no one is legally allowed to hold a job. 

Added to these challenges is a worsening security situation — sending more people fleeing from the camps. Abductions and arson have become commonplace, as have drugs, human trafficking and extortion. Last year, at least 90 people were killed in the Cox’s Bazar camps amid fights over criminal territory. 

Still, a steady stream of Rohingya have nowhere to go but Cox’s Bazar. Back in Myanmar, the war in Rakhine state may be edging toward another genocide, according to observers. Amnesty International this month warned the latest attacks, in which fleeing civilians were bombed, “bear a terrifying resemblance to the atrocities of August 2017.”

The situation has made Rohingya doubly vulnerable to criminals: those fleeing Myanmar must pay off smugglers to get them to Cox’s Bazar. At the same time, those trying to leave the refugee camps — via a risky sea voyage to Malaysia or Indonesia — must also pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to the traffickers. 

Often, the traffickers are tied to gangs controlling the camps. The largest of these groups originated inside Myanmar as militant Rohingya movements but have expanded operations into crimes outside the country’s borders. 

The kidnapping of men and even boys to serve as fighters, assistants and cannon fodder for both the junta and its opposing forces — or to sell back to their desperate family — appears to have become yet another source of their revenue, Rohingya refugees told RFA.

Moustafa, another refugee living in the camps, used to visit his relative’s tea shop often. The gossip he and his friends shared there represented a rare taste of normalcy for those whose lives had been repeatedly upended. 

Now, such moments are impossible, he told RFA in June. One week earlier, Moustafa was sitting in his usual seat when a group of armed men grabbed two youths just outside the shop. The kidnappers were thought by Moustafa to be working for the Arakan Army, or AA — the armed wing of the predominantly Buddhist Rakhine, or Arakanese, self-determination movement.  (The AA has denied forced conscription, calling such claims “unfounded” in an interview published by The New Humanitarian.)  

Days after witnessing the abduction, Moustafa was still shaken.

“Sometimes the camp administration sends police, but most of the time they do not,” he said. “Living in the camp is very hard now. We were tortured and displaced by different groups (in Myanmar), and now our own people torture us.” 

While numerous armed groups operate inside the camps, chief among them are the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, and Rohingya Solidarity Organization, or RSO. Analysts and refugees alike say the militia groups, along with the lesser-known Arakan Rohingya Army, bear the brunt of the responsibility for the conscription abductions. 

ARSA first came to widespread notice in August 2017, when it attacked 30 police outposts and army bases in Rakhine, killing at least 12 officers, and triggering the brutal military crackdown that followed. The militant group gained notoriety in the months and years that followed, including for a particularly violent attack on a Hindu village that saw scores, if not hundreds, killed. 

By 2019, the militants had turned their attention to criminal activity inside the camps, with a report by rights group Fortify Rights noting that ARSA had begun abducting, detaining and torturing its critics. 

RSO, which has been in existence for four decades, has carried out a similar campaign inside Cox’s Bazar. 

In the case of kidnappings for conscription, the group appears to have gone after minors. “We noticed that RSO was doing forced coercion and putting pressure tactics on really different parts of the population,” said John Quinley III, a director of Fortify Rights. “There were some cases of forceful conscription of children.” 

Under international law, it is illegal for children under the age of 15 to be recruited or sent to fight, though an optional children’s rights protocol ratified by most countries, including Myanmar, raises the age to 18. Conscription of civilians of any age by non-state actors, such as ARSA and RSO, is also illegal. 

In July, Fortify Rights released an investigation detailing how armed Rohingya groups were kidnapping refugees from the camps and turning them over to the junta. Refugees who had been abducted and later escaped told Fortify Rights of being nabbed at a market or cafe, brought across the border and handed over to soldiers. One said he had been released only after his family handed over $850. 

‘There is no safe place for us’

The threat of abduction has prompted desperate families to try to move their sons to safety. Given the security situation across Cox’s Bazar, that’s a near impossibility. 

In mid-May, Damira sent her 22-year-old son to stay with relatives in a neighboring refugee camp. The family had recently arrived from Myanmar, fleeing violence in Maungdaw that saw their house burned and relatives killed. But their new home inside Cox’s Bazar has offered little sense of security. 

“Compared to Bangladesh, the fear inside Myanmar was less,” Damira told RFA in June. “We never imagined we would have to hide our son here.”

There are almost no protected spaces within the massive, little-policed camps. Bangladesh’s strict controls on freedom of movement for refugees make it almost impossible to leave, Quinley said. And while the U.N. refugee agency can move anyone facing threats from one camp to another, “RSO has a huge presence around all the camps,” he said. 

It is impossible to know how many children — or adults — have been abducted from the camps to fight inside Myanmar. Citing a confidential U.N. report, AFP reported that about 1,500 Rohingya had been forcibly conscripted from the camps as of May. One local aid worker told RFA he believed 3,000 had been kidnapped, but several humanitarians and analysts acknowledged there was no way to know for sure how many refugees have been sent to fight.

Ali, who crossed into Bangladesh from Myanmar seven years ago, told RFA that whatever normalcy he and his family had managed to carve out in the years since disappeared the moment forced recruitment began. 

“For the last few months we have been living in extreme fear,” he said. In May, he sent his 16-year-old son to live with relatives elsewhere in the camps. Almost every day since he has heard of a boy being kidnapped for suspected forced recruitment. He is anguished by the idea that he cannot protect his child. 

“The day before yesterday, my son told me that the area is also not safe. Every night a group of people have been patrolling. Whenever they spotted a young man, they targeted them to drag them to Myanmar,” he said. 

“Until death there is no safe place for us.” 

So far, Bangladeshi authorities appear unable or unwilling to address the security situation. Both Fortify Rights and Human Rights Watch last year released reports revealing widespread corruption, abuse and extortion by the Armed Police Battalion, or ABPn, which since 2020 has been responsible for camp security. Several senior officials at ABPn declined to comment when reached by RFA, though previously the ABPn defended their record, telling BenarNews last year they had done much to protect those living inside the camps.  

An endless trap

Quinley of Fortify Rights said that RSO appeared to change tactics in May, following protests by women inside the camp and significant pushback from the larger community. RSO has denied both the use of children and a reported shift to going after teachers and leaders, insisting it’s carried out no forced recruitment. In audio messages published by Shafiur Rahman, a journalist who runs Rohingya Refugee News, RSO leader Ko Ko Linn referred to such reports as propaganda and boasted of having thousands of trained volunteers. 

“There’s no need for the general public to be afraid or leave the camps,” he said, according to a translation by Rahman. 

But such claims do little to calm the nerves of those living inside the camps.

Months after his brother’s abduction, Muhammad is no closer to knowing whether it was RSO, ARSA or another group that took Farhad. All he knows is his brother went to school, tried to come home and disappeared. 

“I don’t know if he is alive or not because the last time I was able to talk to him, my brother told me that they are out of food,” Muhammad told RFA in June. While he spoke, rain pounded at the thin walls of their sparse home, seeping through one edge of the roof. His 4-year-old lay sleeping in the corner. 

According to Muhammad, about six weeks after being forced across the border, Farhad managed to escape with three other boys. He called his brother from the jungle, telling him they found a trafficker who could smuggle him back into Bangladesh if given enough money. Muhammad thought the boy’s voice sounded weak, and Farhad admitted he was sick. As Muhammad considered how to scrape together the funds to pay for Farhad’s release, his brother became unreachable — he could no longer get through on the phone. 

From time to time, when he is feeling scared or stressed or angry, Muhammad dials a now useless number. At the other end, a prerecorded message tells him the phone has been switched off. But this is the last number at which he heard from Farhad, so what else can he do but try it, over and over again.