[ad_1]
YANGON: Stay in a seedy refugee camp, desperate, hungry and made to feel a burden, or leave, risking death, rape, human trafficking and months at sea to find a husband she has never met.
This is the grim choice now facing many Rohingya women, who have already suffered the scars of fleeing the violent persecution in Myanmar.
As conditions deteriorate in increasingly overcrowded Bangladeshi refugee camps, desperate parents marry off their daughters to Rohingya men thousands of kilometers (miles) away in Malaysia.
Married by phone or video apps, girls have little say in such unions and rely on the occasional phone call to build a relationship with their new partners as they begin the treacherous journeys to reach them.
“My parents kept asking me to find a way to get to Malaysia; living with them, it was just one more mouth to feed, ”explained Jannat Ara, speaking of her marriage to Nur Alam, a Rohingya man living in Kuala Lumpur.
He has seven other siblings and the family had to share and survive on 25-kilogram (55-pound) rice rations twice a month.
Ara has never met the man she married through a phone call from the refugee camp but, after increasing pressure from her relatives to find him, she decided to leave.
She is one of thousands of Rohingya, who are stateless and unable to travel abroad legally, forced to put their faith in husbands they don’t know and the people smugglers paid to transport them.
Her clandestine route took her by rickshaw to port, and from a small boat to a crowded and rickety trawler.
But Malaysia refused him entry and “after floating in the sea for two months and watching many people die, we returned to where we started,” the 20-year-old told Agence France-Presse from the camps in Bangladesh.
Arranged marriages are part of Rohingya custom, but in refugee camps in Bangladesh, families have little income and struggle to pay for the necessary traditional dowries. Virtual weddings and international betrothal may seem like an ideal solution.
At just 18 years old, the relatives considered Somuda Begum to be “too old” to marry, and although some families in the camp proposed, they all demanded “a lot of money”.
“My parents couldn’t fix my marriage because my father barely had money to pay for the wedding. So he thought it would be better to send me to Malaysia, ”he said.
Begum, one of 11 children, was shown a photo of her future husband before the couple got married via video call: her in-laws and an imam were present at her family’s hut for the “ceremony,” her promised on screen with your friends. But the journey into the unknown had a certain appeal.
“I was often frustrated to hear my mother and neighbors say that I was too old. He had no reason to say no. And deep down I felt a little happy that I would finally go and start my own family, away from this chaos, “he said.
Begum’s elderly father, Mohammad Ledu, entrusted her to an intermediary who promised that for 30,000 taka ($ 350) he would take her to Malaysia. Instead, he took the money as soon as she reached the pot and left her.
It never reached her husband; they strayed from their destination and the ship was adrift at sea for two months before the Bangladesh coast guard rescued them.
[ad_2]
