Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

School a rare sanctuary for traumatised Rohingya kids

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Alexandre Marchand -


Eleven-year-old Rohingya refugee Sayed Nul betrays little emotion as he recounts why his family fled Myanmar: “The Rakhine Buddhists burned my house. And killed people with bullets.”


For the aid workers in Bangladesh dealing with the exodus of Rohingya escaping sectarian violence of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, it is a familiar sight as they try to put young lives back together.


Of the 520,000 Rohingya who have arrived in recent weeks, 290,000 are children, now crammed into refugee camps with minimal facilities to deal with traumas embedded deep inside so many youngsters.


Aid groups are hurrying to set up schools and safe zones for children in the camps. At the entrance to the Leda camp, some learning centres have been set up.


Inside one of the classes about 30 children sang, the torrential rain beating down on the canvas roof almost drowning out their voices.


But memories of the Rakhine violence is never far away.


“These are children, they do not understand what has happened,” Rohingya teacher Shamsul Alam said. “We are trying to make them forget what happened,” he added. UN workers say many of the young exiles never went to school in their country of birth, where the Buddhist majority treat the Rohingya with disdain.


The Myanmar authorities say the military have only targeted Rohingya militants in their crackdown in Rakhine.


But many kids in camps around the Bangladesh border town of Cox’s Bazar recount scenes of massacres, torture and rape.


“Their villages were theatres of war, with the noise and the bullets everywhere,” says Shamail Das, 22, another teacher at the hastily set up school. Alam, Das and the other teachers deliberately do not discuss the Rakhine horrors in class.


“If we talk about the atrocities with them, it could damage their minds at first. But in time it could help ease their pain,” said Morsida Akter, a Bangladeshi teacher.


There are currently 200 learning centres in the camps teaching 17,000 Rohingya. But those schools are just a drop in the ocean compared to what is required — the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, says it needs to build 1,300 schools.


The Dhaka government has let the new Rohingya refugees in, but it does not want to do anything that could facilitate their integration.


Bangladesh has repeatedly said the Rohingya must return to Myanmar. — AFP


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