‘I watched my children drown’

The imam leads the funeral prayers before the cot is picked up and carried to a small graveyard nearby.

The body is lowered into the ground and covered with the freshly dug earth. The mound is one of many in this plot in Shah Porir Dwip, a small coastal village in southeastern Bangladesh.

There is nothing to mark the graves. No names or clues to identify the bodies. That is because they are all Rohingya bodies. Refugees fleeing the brutality In Myanmar.

They were all on a boat that capsized last week. There were about 60 or 70 people, mostly women and children, packed on to the small wooden boat. Only a few of the bodies have been recovered.

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The one being buried today washed up on the beach four days after the boat capsized. A mourner shows me his mobile phone. It has photographs of the body being washed and prepared for burial. The Rohingya is a man in his early 20s. But it is hard to be sure of his age because the body has been in the water so long. His skin is bleached white in places, the eyes are bulging and the body is bloated.

“I’m the imam and teacher at the Shah Porir Dwip madrasa,” Bodrul Alam tells me. “I heard about a boat wreck from the coast guards. They recovered 12 bodies. With the permission of the Bangladesh Border Guards we brought them here and prepared them for burial.”

Islamic burials must take place as soon as possible after death. The imam shows me some more photographs. This time of the burials that took place right after the boast capsized. I can see five white shrouds laid out in line on the ground. Two are clearly adults. The other three are much smaller. One is a child who can be no older than a few years old.

The survivors of the boat wreck have taken refuge inside Kutupulong Camp. When I arrive to meet them they are sitting in silence in a classroom in a disused school. It is late and dark outside. There is no electricity. In the group there are three young boys and two women. All wear a haunted, hollow expression. They have been through an unimaginable ordeal.

Moina is crying softly. She is just 25 years old and is now a widow. She is also grieving for her two children, boys of seven and four years old who drowned that night.

“I had my two children on my my lap. When I saw the wave coming I tried to pass one to my husband. But he got separated from us. I was trying to swim holding on to my seven-year-old son. But he told me he couldn’t swim anymore and I had to let him go because my younger child was swallowing water. Then another wave hit us and that separated me from my younger child. Another wave hit and we both went under.”

The journey from Myanmar to Bangladesh was taken late at night under the cover of darkness to avoid detection by Bangladesh border guards. After several hours at sea the boat almost made it to Bangladesh. But it hit a sandbank. And as it was stuck it was hit by a succession of large waves.

We stop the interview to give Moina some time. Through my Rohingya interpreter Abul Kalam, I ask Moina if she wants to stop. I have no desire to make her relive her ordeal. But she says she wants to continue. It is important for her to tell her story so the world can hear about the suffering of her people.

“When I got separated from my boy I started looking for him under the water. After a while I had to come up for air and after then his dead body floated up in front of me. I could also hear my oldest boy calling out for me as he was being swept away by the current. Both my children died.”

Moina’s husband also drowned.

Sitting in a line in front of Moina are three small boys: Arafat, Ahmad and Mohammed. They are all orphans now. They lost their entire families when the boat sank.

Arafat is eight years old. He has big, black eyes. When he speaks he rocks gently and keeps his fingers over his mouth.

“I was on the boat with my mother, father, sister and brother. We all got separated in the water. My mother found me and grabbed on to me as she was sinking. But I told her, ‘You are going to die and you will drown me as well.’ So she loosened her grip and let me go. Then she drowned.”

So too did the rest of Arafat’s family.

Next to Arafat is Ahmad. He is a little older, 12 years old. The left side of his head has been bandaged.

“When the boat got stuck on the island the boatman asked to get down. So we did. That’s when a large wave came and hit us. At the time I was with my mother, sister and nephews. The waves kept coming and hitting us and we all got separated. I tried to swim and float and reach the shore somehow. I got swept into a nearby mangrove and climbed a tree. Because it was night I fell asleep. But then I fell and hit my head on a branch.”

Ahmad’s father died some time ago. He only had his mother, older sister and five nephews. They were all on the boat together. None of them survived.

Mohammed is also eight years old. But he looks much younger. He is the smallest of the three boys. He was on the boat with his mother, three sisters and brother. He is the only one who survived.

“I was in the water when I saw a fat, dead body in front of me. I held on to it and started floating. We drifted into the shore.”

All of the survivors came from a village in Buthidaung, a small township inside Myanmar’s Rakhine state. They were fleeing the brutality of Myanmar soldiers and had hope to escape to safety in Bangladesh.

Instead they find themselves widowed or orphaned and alone inside one of the world’s largest refugee camps. news.sky.com