Doctors treating some of the 429,000 Rohingya who have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in recent weeks have seen dozens of women with injuries consistent with violent sexual attacks, UN clinicians and other health workers said.
The medics’ accounts, backed in some cases by medical notes reviewed by Reuters, lend weight to repeated allegations, ranging from molestation to gang rape, levelled by women from the stateless minority group against Myanmar’s armed forces.
Myanmar officials have mostly dismissed such allegations as militant propaganda designed to defame its military, which they say is engaged in legitimate counterinsurgency operations and under orders to protect civilians.
Zaw Htay, spokesman for Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said the authorities would investigate any allegations brought to them. “Those rape victim women should come to us,” he said. “We will give full security to them. We will investigate and we will take action.”
It is rare for UN doctors and aid agencies to speak about rape allegedly committed by a state’s armed forces, given the sensitivity of the matter.
Fraction of the cases
Doctors at a clinic run by the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) at the Leda makeshift refugee say they treated hundreds of women with injuries they said were from violent sexual assaults during the army operation in October and November.
Doctors at the Leda clinic showed a Reuters reporter three case files, without divulging the identity of the patients. One said a 20-year-old woman was treated on September 10, seven days after she said she was raped by a soldier in Myanmar.
At Bangladesh government clinics supported by UN agencies in the Ukhia area, doctors reported treating 19 women who had been raped, said Dr Misbah Uddin Ahmed, head of the main health complex there, citing reports from female clinicians.
In one day alone, September 14, six women showed up at one of the clinics, all saying they were sexually assaulted. “They all said Myanmar army had done this.”
The doctor treated 15 of the 19 cases of women who appeared to have been raped, and another eight women who had been physically assaulted. Some were given emergency contraceptives, and all were given treatment to reduce the risk of contracting HIV and jabs against hepatitis. Symptoms included bite marks over the arms and back, tearing and laceration on the vagina and vaginal bleeding, the doctor said.
Internal reports compiled by aid agencies in Cox’s Bazar recorded that 49 SGBV survivors” were identified in just four days between August 28-31. SGBV, or sexual and gender-based violence is used to refer to only cases of rape, according to UN doctors.
A situation report from aid agencies says more than 350 people had been referred for “life-saving care” relating to gender-based violence – a broad term that includes rape, attempted rape and molestation – since August 25. Kate White, emergency medical coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Cox’s Bazar said the charity had treated at least 23 cases of sexual and gender-based violence including gang-rape and sexual assault since August 25.
