Noor asked the girl. “She says yes, she is Sareema.”
Shanti explained why she had come to the camps, pausing every so often to let Noor catch up. “I need to record this interview so that it can be used in court as evidence against the men who hurt you. I know it will be difficult, but please tell me everything you can remember.”
Sareema replied, Noor translating. “She says she understands. She wants these bad men to be punished.”
“I will do my best to make sure that happens.”
Shanti set up the small camera, making sure it caught Sareema’s face, then set it to record. She sat on the floor across from Sareema, her backup digital recorder in hand. “What village do you come from, Sareema?”
“Myar Zin.”
Shanti was familiar with Sareema’s story, but listening to her tell it over the next hour and a half left her feeling sick.
Soldiers had come to Sareema’s village in the middle of the night and forced their way into people’s homes, shooting the men and dragging the women outside. They’d killed Sareema’s young husband and his parents in front of her. Then four of them had dragged Sareema into her home and took turns raping and beating her even though she was heavily pregnant.
“One cut my breast with a knife. They kicked my belly again and again until I began to bleed between my legs. I passed out.”
Smoke had revived her, waking her to a nightmare. All the homes of the village, including her own, had been set on fire, women and children trapped inside.
“She thought she would burn to death. It was hard to walk. She was in so much pain. She broke through one of the bamboo walls and ran into the forest. She could hear women screaming. She recognized her sister’s voice. They were burning alive. She wanted to help them, but the soldiers were still there and shooting people.”
Sareema’s baby boy had been stillborn under a tree the next day. Though she’d lost a lot of blood, she’d met other survivors, some of whom had given her food and water. She’d managed to make it with other refugees to the Naf River, where a fisherman had agreed to take them across in exchange for their valuables.
“They had nothing. The fisherman demanded that one of the women give him sex instead. He didn’t want Sareema because she was bleeding.”
Sareema had arrived at Kutupalong feverish from postpartum infection and weak from blood loss. There had been burns on her hands and feet that needed treatment, too.
“She has not felt happy since that night. She never got to raise her baby boy. She misses her husband. She misses her parents and her sister. None of them escaped. At night, she can still hear her sister screaming.”
Sareema didn’t shed a tear as she recounted this horror, but Shanti could see she was trembling. “You are brave, Sareema. I know it must be hard to make yourself talk about this. I am so sorry that you were made to suffer and that your family was killed. What happened to you was a terrible crime. These men should be punished. Are you certain they were soldiers and not border guards or men from another village?”
Noor translated Shanti’s words, gave Shanti Sareema’s answer. “They wore green uniforms with red patches on their sleeves.”
The uniform of the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s army.
Shanti asked her if she would recognize any of the men who’d been part of the attack, whether she’d gotten a good look at their faces.
“It was dark, and I was so afraid, but there was one face. He told the other soldiers what to do. When he stepped out of his truck, the headlights lit up his face. They called him Naing.”
Shanti set a folder of photos in front of her—officers who served with Naing, henchmen, and Naing himself. “Can you point to him if you see him here?”
Tears filled Sareema’s eyes. She pointed to Naing, answered.
Noor translated. “Yes. It was this man.”
Connor stoodwatch as three different women met with Shanti to offer testimony against General Naing. The walls weren’t thick, so he couldn’t help but overhear. He’d seen some pretty sick shit in his time as an operator, but their stories were among the worst he’d ever heard.
Babies torn from their mothers’ arms and thrown into fires. Little girls and women gang-raped, mutilated, murdered. Old men left to bleed out, their limbs hacked off. Grandmothers paraded naked in front of lines of laughing soldiers who filmed it on their cell phones before killing the women.
Connor wanted to find Naing and make him eat his own fucking balls.
How strange it was. This hospital was full of volunteers from around the world trying to save lives, while across the border, men made a game of taking them. What the fuck was it about human beings anyway? What other animal systematically slaughtered its own kind?
Are you sure you want to look in that mirror?
Connor ate a snack bar from an MRE pack for lunch, rain still falling in sheets beyond the windows, battering the roof.
A small boy with bare feet rolled something along the floor. He must have been five or six years old, his yellow shirt dirty, his cutoff shorts worn. He stopped when he reached Connor and looked up at him through big brown eyes.