(8 May 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Meulaboh, Aceh, Indonesia – 04 April 2024
1.Various of Rohingya women and girls gathered in tents to learn English
2. Various STILLs of of 12-year-old girl identified in this story as ‘N’ ++NAME WITHHELD AS SHE IS A SEXUAL ASSAULT SURVIVOR++
3. SOUNDBITE (Rohingya) ‘N’, Rohingya refugee: ++NAME WITHHELD AS SHE IS A SEXUAL ASSAULT SURVIVOR++
++OVERLAID WITH SHOT 2 AND SHOTS OF ROHINGYA WOMEN++
“They again put me in the room and then they threw me out of the room in the morning. I was very badly tortured during the night…they pushed my body, tapped my body, touched my body, rubbed my body with (his) body and tried to touch my body and tried to do this and that. That’s why I cried very badly and I cried the whole night.”
4. Rohingya men sitting outside the building
5. SOUNDBITE (Rohingya) Jannat Ullah, Rohingya refugee:
“As we heard our mothers and sisters shouting, we could not bear that any more, so I peeped. I was beaten for peeping and then again I peeped as the girls were shouting. (I saw) him making the girls massage his body, and washing his hands. Then another person entered after the driver was done.”
(Person off camera:) “What did he do?”
“Raped, he raped.”
(Person off camera:) “He directly raped?”
“Yes, he directly raped.”
(Person off camera:) “Did you see?”
“Yes, I saw.”
6. Various of Rohingya playing football in front of temporary tents
STORYLINE:
The boat glided across waters that were dark and still, under a night sky that was cloudless and calm.
But on board, the 12-year-old girl quaked with fear.
The captain and crew who she says had tortured her and three other women and girls were not finished.
And the punishment for disobedience, the men warned, would be death.
It was the third night that the girl and around 140 other ethnic Rohingya refugees had been trapped on the wooden fishing boat, floating off the coast of Indonesia.
These children, women and men had fled Bangladesh and their homeland of Myanmar in a bid to escape violence and terror, only to face the same horrors with a crew that seemed to delight in their dread.
Huddled among the other women and girls, the 12-year-old — identified in this story only by the initial N, because she is a sexual assault survivor — tried to hide her face.
She had already survived a night in the captain’s bedroom, where she says he and several crew members had beaten and sexually abused her.
Like most of the passengers, she had survived attacks by Myanmar’s military that forced her and her family to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
There, she had survived nearly seven years in violence-plagued refugee camps.
And she had thus far survived this journey without her family, who hoped she’d make it to Malaysia, where she was promised as a child bride to a man she had never met.
Her young life had been one long battle to survive.
And so, it seemed, this night would be no different.
The captain was in a rage. He ordered more girls to join him and his crew in the bedroom.
No one budged.
“If you don’t come to us,” the captain shouted, “then we will capsize this boat!”
What happened next would force N and the other Rohingya on board into yet another battle for survival.
For many, this would be the battle they finally lost.
In March, Indonesian officials and local fishermen rescued 75 people from atop the overturned hull of a boat off the coast of Indonesia’s northern province of Aceh.
Until now, little was known about how the boat capsized, or why.
The results of this mass exodus have been catastrophic.
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