A young Rohingya woman’s journey to the

impossible
From Terror to Triumph

A HAPPY MOMENT: Formin Akter, a young Rohingya woman, prepares to

leave her refugee camp in Bangladesh for the city of Chittagong to attend
school at the Asian University for Women. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir
Hossain
Formin Akter overcame resistance in her community and deadly violence and
repression in Myanmar to achieve her dream of going to college. But her joy is
bittersweet as her sister, who had the same dream, is left behind.
By ZEBA SIDDIQUI-Filed Dec. 20, 2018, noon GMT

CHITTAGONG, Bangladesh – On the first day of

the school year at the Asian University for Women in southern Bangladesh,
groups of teenage girls in skinny jeans, sleeveless tops and T-shirts chattered,
their laughter carrying through the sticky air.
Formin Akter, 19, stood in a corner by a row of suitcases, facing away from
the students who seemed so modern and full of confidence. Wearing a tunic
and pants that hung loosely on her, she nervously adjusted a brown georgette
scarf that kept slipping from her head.
When she finally saw someone she recognized, she beamed, holding a card
tied to red straps around her neck.
“Look at my identity card!” she said, flashing it like a gold medal.
Getting a college ID may have been a mildly exciting rite of passage for other
new students. For Formin, a stateless Rohingya Muslim from Buddhist-
dominated Myanmar, it meant the world.
She had spent most of her life dreaming about this moment. But as a
Rohingya in Myanmar’s apartheid-like Rakhine State, her goal of attending
university had been thwarted. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled a
campaign of arson, rape and killing by the military since August 2017, and
many of those still in the country are languishing in de facto internment
camps.
Raised by a father who wanted more than his peasant’s life for his daughters,
Formin and her older sister, Nur Jahan, had defied those in their community
who believed education was wasted on women. They were the only two girls
from their village ever to finish high school.
Back then, the sisters made a pact. Someday, they would go to university
together.
In her dorm room, Formin moved her belongings into a cupboard: a small
pile of clothes, a dinner plate, a steel pot. Her Burmese-English dictionary –
one of the few things she had taken with her when fleeing Myanmar a year
before – was tucked on the top shelf. On one of the walls of the dorm, someone
had painted a quote from the Harry Potter series: “It does not do to dwell on
dreams and forget to live.”
A few hours to the south, in the world’s largest refugee camp, her sister Nur
Jahan spends her days teaching children and trying to forget how close she
was to realizing her childhood dream. This year, her parents pushed her to
accept a young man’s proposal; now, she is married and pregnant, and must
stay at home.
MAKING FRIENDS: Formin Akter, center, talks to new friends at the Asian
University for Women. REUTERS/Zeba Siddiqui
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Formin said her sister calls her every day. Formin is excited about college, but
she knows she’s a constant reminder of the education that her sister, and
hundreds of thousands of other Rohingya women, can’t have.
“I miss my sister more than anything else,” she said. “Every time I spent with
her, I miss.”
SKIPPING ROPE IN A REMOTE VILLAGE
The two girls loved to skip rope together when they were growing up in
Hlaing Thi, an all-Muslim village of about 6,000 people in Rakhine, one of
Myanmar’s poorest and least-developed states.
Now the village where the girls grew up is no longer home. Scores of Rohingya
houses in northern Rakhine, including those in Hlaing Thi, were burned and
abandoned in what the United Nations has called an “ethnic cleansing”
carried out with “genocidal intent.” Satellite images show what remains of the
village: rolling green interspersed with the fields that former neighbors left
behind, cut here and there by narrow streams. Formin would visit one of
those streams every day with her mother to collect drinking water in plastic
pails.
Since the military launched its crackdown in August 2017, more than 730,000
Rohingya have fled northern Rakhine for neighbouring Bangladesh. About
15,000 fled this year alone.
Myanmar’s government denies committing abuses against the Rohingya,
saying the military action in northern Rakhine came in response to attacks by
Muslim militants. Still, the country doesn’t grant most Rohingya citizenship,
and Myanmar authorities refer to the Rohingya as “Bengali,” a derogatory
term because it implies they are interlopers from Bangladesh. The
government and the military didn’t respond to questions about specific
incidents in this story.
Restrictions on education, employment and travel meant most Rohingya were
like Formin’s father, farmers or day laborers largely cut off from the outside
world. According to a 2015 survey by the Yangon-based Center for Diversity
and National Harmony, Rakhine had the country’s lowest literacy levels and
the lowest rates of primary and secondary school enrollment in Myanmar.
Rohingya students struggle to understand teachers because their language
isn’t recognized in the public school system.
A DREAM DENIED: Formin’s sister Nur Jahan also dreamed of going to
college. Now she is married and pregnant and must stay in the refugee camp,
where she teaches children. REUTERS/Zeba Siddiqui
But Formin’s uncle, Sayat Hossain, showed what was possible against the
odds. Admitted to an engineering college in 1994 in the then-capital, Yangon,
he was forced to leave school after it was shut down in response to pro-
democracy protests two years later, and he fled Myanmar to find work as a
day laborer in Malaysia. Eventually he made his way to asylum in Norway,
where he now works as a translator.
“My uncle studied, so he is in Norway. My father didn’t study, so he is a
farmer,” Formin said.
For many in Formin’s village, her uncle was something of a local hero. “There
was no family like theirs in the village,” Mohammed Bashar, the Rohingya
chairman of Hlaing Thi, said from a refugee camp in Bangladesh. “They
understood the value of an education.”
Formin’s father, Mohammed Hossain, imagined a happier future for his
daughters. “You get respect when you have an education,” he said. “Illiterate
people have to do hard work, but educated people can find comfortable work.
I wanted that for my girls.”
In 2012, when Formin was 13 and Nur Jahan was 16, an international
humanitarian group was operating schools for children in need of a secondary
school education in northern Rakhine. It offered the sisters the chance to
study under a program that would cover their tuition and living expenses. But
they would have to move away from home.
There were murmurs of disapproval in the village. “People thought the girls
would be ruined,” said Bashar, the former village chairman.
Formin’s father said he was often told by fellow villagers: “No matter how
much you make them study, they have to sit at home and cook for their
husbands. What is the point?”
But he allowed his daughters to go away to school – just as racial and religious
tensions in Rakhine boiled over.

READY FOR COLLEGE: Formin checks her phone and her father waits to
say goodbye before she leaves the refugee camp to attend the Asian University
for Women. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
MALALA ON THE RADIO
In a white notebook with pink flowers, Formin kept a diary. “I wrote about
some happy and sad things every day,” she said. “If someone said anything
bad about me, I used to write about that.”
In maintaining that diary, Formin had unconsciously started creating a
record of events in Rakhine that few in the largely illiterate population were
documenting firsthand. “At that time, we didn’t have TV, radio or mobile,”
she said, matter-of-factly.
Just weeks after Formin and her sister began school away from their village,
communal violence broke out. It was June 2012, and thousands were
displaced across Rakhine State as Buddhists and Muslims torched each
other’s homes.
“We saw the military shoot two people going on a motorcycle,” Formin said.
Schools were shut, travel was risky, and the hostel where she and other
students lived had to close.
Authorities responded to the violence, in part, by barring the Rohingya from
enrolling in the only university in Rakhine State, citing unspecified “security
concerns,” according to a report by U.N. investigators earlier this year. That
effectively denied the Rohingya access to higher education, which was already
limited because of travel restrictions, the report said.
But that didn’t break the sisters’ determination to keep studying. Formin and
Nur Jahan moved to a secondary school in Kyein Chaung, a village with a
bustling market where Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus ran shops alongside
each other. Kyein Chaung had been largely untouched by the wave of violence
in 2012, and things began to look hopeful.
In 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept elections
and came to power in a country that had long been ruled by generals. Many
Rohingya rooted for Suu Kyi, who had been a political prisoner, believing she
would put an end to their persecution.
Nur Jahan, three years older, had finished high school and was teaching
children for an international nongovernmental organization. She wanted
Formin to graduate, like her, and was paying her sister’s study costs with her
NGO salary.
At school in Kyein Chaung, Formin met a teacher, Ali Ahmed, who was one of
the few Rohingya licensed to teach in public schools. He says he encouraged
her and other Rohingya students to dream big.
“Master Ali,” as the students called him, would often pepper his lectures with
inspiring stories, sometimes pulled from news reports he heard on the small
radio he kept.
That was how he first heard about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani peace and
education rights activist. He took the story to Formin’s class with a challenge:
“If she can go to Oxford from Pakistan, why can’t you?”
Formin was struck by the story from the moment she heard how a young
Muslim woman from rural Pakistan stood up to the Taliban, survived a
gunshot wound to the head from a would-be assassin and, in 2014, won the
Nobel Peace Prize. At home, she told her family all about Malala. “Did you
know they put a gun to her head?” Formin said. “She is a great girl. She cares
about education, not other things.”
In her class, she also heard the story of Helen Keller’s remarkable education.
Her sister Nur Jahan found her a copy of Keller’s autobiography, and she
read it with the same rapt admiration.
“She is blind, but she didn’t stop learning,” Formin said. “We can see
everything – we can’t stop studying.”
The heroic stories of Malala and Helen kept her dreams of university alive.
And she began to nurture another desire: to become an inspiration for
Rohingya girls like her.
“Did you know they put a gun to her head? She is a great girl. She cares about
education, not other things.”
Formin Akter, speaking of activist Malala Yousafzai
AN INSPIRATION: Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai inspired
Formin. Her teacher in Myanmar asked the class: “If she can go to Oxford
from Pakistan, why can’t you?” REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
COULD SHE PASS HER EXAM?
On Oct. 8, 2016, Formin remembers, she went to bed early because she had a
physics and chemistry test the next morning. When she woke before dawn for
a final round of study, all the students in her lodgings were already up.
Overnight, dozens of Muslim militants armed with sticks, knives and
homemade weapons had launched an attack on police outposts.
The attack marked the emergence of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army
(ARSA) – a group that claimed to be fighting for the rights of the Rohingya.
In the early light, Formin said, she could see soldiers fanning out across the
village. She heard gunfire. The students hunkered down in their lodgings,
afraid to move. Some 80,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in the months that
followed, many claiming soldiers had torched homes, arrested and
tortured suspected militants and raped women.
Once again, schools were shut, and gradually reopened over the next few
weeks. But Formin’s parents had no plans of sending her back this time. They
were terrified. It wasn’t until four months later, as Formin’s high school
graduation exam neared, that her parents finally relented. They were still
fearful, her mother said, but they also wanted to prove wrong those in the
village who had predicted that Formin would fail.
A bittersweet time, as one sister heads off to college and another stays home.
Formin and her father made the risky trip back to her high school to take
the test. Of the 150 girls who sat for the exam at the Kyein Chaung school in
March 2017, only four would pass.
Myanmar’s Education Ministry typically puts matriculation results on
Facebook, but Formin’s village rarely had a connection. She asked a friend in
another village to look for her roll number on the list of those who had passed,
but the friend couldn’t find it.
Formin cried for days. One evening, one of her teachers called and asked her:
“Formin, your roll number is 542?”
“I said yes.”
“OK,” he said. “You passed your exam.”
‘I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE’
Formin returned to school to receive her diploma. But once again, violence
intervened.
The militant group ARSA had waged a more ambitious attack in the early
hours of Aug. 25, 2017, across security posts in northern Rakhine. In the
military’s response, the U.N. said, entire Rohingya villages were razed, scores
of women were raped and murdered, and an estimated 10,000 people, if not
more, were killed. The military denies these allegations and says it made a
proportionate response to militant attacks.
As houses went up in flames in Hlaing Thi, Formin’s mother called her at her
lodgings. “Our village is burning. We are leaving for Bangladesh,” she said.
“What will you do, Formin?”
Satellite image: Planet Labs; Sources: United Nations Operational Satellite
Applications Programme (UNOSAT); United Nations Institute for Training
and Research (UNITAR)

Formin didn’t know what to do. She felt paralyzed as the rattle of bullets went
on and on around her.
For the first time in her life, she said, she felt hope slipping away, and she
cried – cried because she was scared for her life, and cried for her dream of
attending college.
“I thought I was going to die,” she said. “I thought that would be the last day
of my life.”
Formin remained locked up inside her lodgings for two days. But as she saw
local Buddhists and the military start to burn houses in the village, an account
that echoes those of other eyewitnesses on both sides of the conflict in
Rakhine, she decided to escape with five schoolmates.
She was in a panic over how to get away. From afar, her sister Nur Jahan
helped her once again.
“She didn’t know the way. When I called her on the phone, Formin was
crying,” Nur Jahan said. “There was military everywhere.”
“Just follow the people,” Nur Jahan told her.
Using the dim light of a small phone her father had given her, Formin walked
with crowds of people heading toward the border through monsoon-drenched
forests and streams, protecting her belongings that were wrapped carefully in
plastic under her arm.
The group moved by night to avoid security forces and civilian mobs, stopping
at abandoned houses for shelter. Along the way, Formin said, she saw several
bodies.
At the border with Bangladesh, Formin paid the equivalent of $10 to a
boatman to cross the Naf River. On a wooden boat with nine other people, she
reached the other shore and a refugee camp that would become a home in
exile.
When she was reunited with her family at the camp, one of the first things she
asked about was her books back home. Between tears, her mother told her the
house had burned down.
Formin’s most prized possessions had turned to ash.
Gone too, was a small pink-and-white notebook – her first diary.
A SISTER LEFT BEHIND
Almost exactly a year since she had fled her country to reach the refugee
camps of Bangladesh, Formin was preparing to leave. She was going to
college.
“I am happy, but nervous,” she said, blushing, as she sat on her knees on the
mud floor of a hut. She and 24 other Rohingya girls from the refugee camps
had been accepted to the university’s “Pathways to Promise” program, which
offers a full scholarship to selected young women in marginalized
communities.
She dipped a hand into a purse to fish out a compact face powder with a
mirror. She held the mirror in one hand and with the other lightly dabbed the
peach-colored powder onto her cheeks with the puff, moving her face from
left to right. “I have watched makeup videos,” she said, giggling.
She also now had a smartphone that she’d bought with her earnings from
working as a translator and community health worker for NGOs in the camp.
She had filled it with language learning apps: Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, English;
and a Bollywood movie about a Hindu boy and Muslim girl who flee
communal riots together, and eventually get married.
But marriage hasn’t been a fairytale ending for her sister Nur Jahan.

EAGER TO LEARN: Schoolchildren peer inside Nur Jahan’s hut in the

refugee camp, where she offers private lessons to 22 students. More than half
the refugees living at the camps in Bangladesh are children with no access to
formal education, according to UNICEF. REUTERS/Zeba Siddiqui
In May, Nur Jahan married a Rohingya from their village. Like Formin, she
had been desperate to continue studying, but she was older, and there was no
guarantee the university program in Chittagong would come through.
“After coming here, we were worried about our daughters’ future. The
situation became uncertain,” their father said. “She has younger sisters who
are growing fast.” So when a proposal came from a fellow refugee who had
spent time working in Saudi Arabia, her parents pushed her to accept.
Her husband declined to allow Nur Jahan to be interviewed alone. She sat in a
chair with her back straight and legs folded, listening attentively and speaking
enthusiastically about her relationship with Formin and their life back in
Hlaing Thi.
But midway during talk of college, as Nur Jahan tried to stay composed in
front of her husband, her voice cracked, and she started to cry.
“Our father was very poor, but he helped a lot for our studies,” she said. “We
made a pact that we would go to college together, and after we finished our
education, we would help our father any way we can.”
Her 79-year-old grandfather, Nur Ahmed, said: “Nur Jahan is even smarter
than Formin. She would do even better at college.
“I know she is sad. We are also sad. We wish we had waited. But now we
cannot do anything. I am happy for Formin, but I feel bad for Nur Jahan. She
still blames us.”
Formin is hoping to study law after she completes her five-year university
program, including two years spent improving her English, math and
comprehension skills.
“I am a Rohingya. If I become a lawyer, I can do something for the cause of
the Rohingya,” she said.
She reflected on her role models, Malala and Helen Keller. And she spoke of
another woman whom she revered. Growing up, she said, she idolized Suu
Kyi, who has drawn international criticism for her silence on the plight of the
Rohingya.
“Yes, yes, I really liked her!” she said. “We thought that woman stood for
everyone.”
If she ever met Suu Kyi, she said, she would ask her: “I am Rohingya, but I
am also a woman like you. We are all women like you. Please put yourself in
our place. What do you feel?”
How we reported this story
This report is based on multiple interviews with Formin, Nur Jahan and their
family, their uncle in Norway, people from their village in Rakhine State,
Formin’s former teachers, a former classmate and her current college mates,
as well as the founder and staff of the Asian University for Women. It also
reflects research conducted by human rights organizations on the state of
education for the Rohingya in Rakhine State, and interviews with rights
officials with experience in the region. Formin and her family’s accounts of
the August 2017 violence in northern Rakhine are consistent with the accounts
of dozens of refugees whom Reuters has interviewed in the past year.
Posted by Thavam