MSF Bangladesh head says gender-based violence growing among Rohingyas

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Thousands of persecuted Rohingyas at the squalid camps in Cox’s Bazar are suffering extra stress as their hopes of returning to homeland in Myanmar is fading fast, according to Bangladesh country representative Natalia Torrent Martinex of Medicine Sans Frontiers.
Almost all Rohingyas wished to go back to their Rakhine state from where they have fled five years ago, said Natalia.
Among many medical services, MSF provides psychological services to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence at its facilities in Cox’s Bazar.
Natalia said that many Rohingya women who were abused by the Myanmar military tried to forget their trauma after coming under MSF medical care.
‘The women at our clinics now do not talk about the past, meaning what happened to them in Myanmar,’ she said.
MSF also runs a programme at Kamrangirchar in Dhaka to assist survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.
Natalia said that they were coming across growing number of incidents of gender-based violence not only at the camps but also outside the camps in Cox’s Bazar and at Kamrangirchar.
She said that they also found that many of the perpetrators were people close to the victims.
‘Let’s be honest, we know majority of these things happen in the family or in the community,’ she said.
Since 1978, Rohingyas have been taking shelter in Bangladesh while fleeing targeted violence by the Myanmar military.
The latest violence, which began in August 2017, has led to an unprecedented exodus, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to live at camps with deteriorating conditions in Cox’s Bazar, more than 250 kilometres from Rakhine.
Some 8,60,000 Rohingyas have been living in an area of 26 square kilometres for the last five years, which the UN has described as one of the world’s worst humanitarian and human rights crises.
‘But they see no solution around the corner,’ she said while indicating the insignificant progress on their repatriation during an interview with New Age at her office in Dhaka on December 1.

To read the full interview, please log onto www.newagebd.net