Updated: 7:42am – Rajuma Begum, 20, survived the August 30 massacre in Tula Toli, believed to have been one of the most brutal incidents of Myanmar army violence.
Villagers were taken to a beach by the river where the men were separated from the women and children and then gunned down, hacked to death and bayoneted.
Rajuma was holding her son, Mohammed Saddique, in her arms, when four or five soldiers began taking women away in groups of five to seven.
“They took me along with another four women inside a house,” Rajuma recounted, speaking at a school in Kutupalong refugee camp.
“They ripped my son from my arms and threw him [on the ground] and cut his throat,” she said, before burying her head in her hands and starting to wail.
“I am thirsty to hear someone calling me ‘ma’,” Rajuma said between sobs. “I had a younger brother who is 10 years old. I’m sorry to him because they took him and I couldn’t save him.”
Rajuma was held in a room with three other mothers, one teenage girl and one woman who was about 50 years old. The soldiers raped them all except the older woman. Rajuma was raped by two men for what she said felt like two or three hours.
Afterwards, they beat the women with wooden sticks, then flashed torches on them three times to make sure they were dead. The soldiers locked them inside the house and set fire to it.
It was the heat from the blaze that made Rajuma regain consciousness. She was able to break through the bamboo walls and escape. She hid on a hill for a day and when she came out on the other side encountered three other women from her village and an orphan.
Naked, she dressed herself in clothes abandoned by fleeing Rohingya. When she crossed the border, a Bangladeshi helped her get to Kutapalong where she was treated at a clinic. In Bangladesh, she was reunited with her husband Mohammed Rafiq, 20, who had survived by swimming across the river before the massacre in Tula Toli began.
“My family members were killed, and now there is only me, my brother and my husband here. I want to share this with all the world so they can bring some peace,” said Rajuma, who has scars from being beaten on her chin and on the right side of her head where her hair has been shaved and is hidden by a red headscarf.
Musa Ali, my brother, 10 years old, I am guessing he died, and my sister-in-law Khalida who was 25 years old, and her son Rojook Ali, who is two a half years old, and my son Mohammed Saddique, who was one year and four months.”
Rajuma said: “It’s important to know our story, what happened to us as the Rohingya.”
-Al Jazeera
