It's like working in a journey that has no light in it.
If you are not tortured by the local Rakhine Buddhists, you will be tortured by the army.
If you are not tortured by the army, you will be tortured by the navy.
If you are not tortured by the navy, you are tortured by the traffickers.
If you are not tortured by the traffickers, you might drown.
If you are not drowned, you might get raped.
When they come to other side, now they say, where we have reached?
Now we just came out for one hell and now we went to another hell.
When Ambia fled her homeland in Myanmar,
she was a single young Muslim woman with hope for a life free of persecution in Malaysia.
But by the time she arrived in Kuala Lumpur,
she had a Rohingya husband she had never met who was 20 years older than her.
Rohingya men have been fleeing Myanmar for so long.
There is now a gender imbalance in their homeland in Rakhine state.
And human traffickers have started to capitalize on a new product they can sell,
marriage.
When human traffickers have women and girls in their custody holding them in captivity,
in many cases they are selling these women and girls to the highest bidders.
In this way, the trafficking gangs are treating this as a rather lucrative business,
the buying and selling of women into these situations of marriage.
Matthew Smith, the executive director of fortified rights,
an advocacy group that monitors Rohingya refugees,
says widespread human rights violations in Myanmar
are causing a dramatic increase of forced marriages for female asylum seekers.
But for Rohingya activists already living in exile,
the increase in incidents of forced marriage is only the latest trend leading to the commonly believed conspiracy theory
that there is a systematic plan by the Burmese government to eliminate the Rohingya people.
So traffickers are now given permission by the government to go and browse around
to those vulnerable families and sell the dream that the circumstances are really really bad here.
People cannot leave, if you leave by boat tomorrow or day after tomorrow,
you go to Malaysia, you go to Thailand, you find Indonesia.
It's a very, very nice place. It's a Muslim country where all they welcome you,
they will give you food, they will give you shelter.
All those are promises. When they come out on the boat, it's a totally different story start.
Ambia thought she was paying for safe voyage to Malaysia,
but really she had walked into a trap by her own people.
The traffickers, who are also ethnic Rohingya, gave her mother a choice.
If they wanted to be released, she could sell her daughter into prostitution in Thailand
or marry her to an older man looking for a bride in Malaysia.
The traffickers earned just over a thousand dollars for arranging the marriage.
They got another thousand for her sister, who was also sold.
Although the arranged marriage got Ambia and her family to Malaysia,
their situation here has been anything but bright.
After her arrival to Malaysia, her husband disappeared,
leaving her to take care of her niece, sixth sister, and mother.
But refugees like Ambia, who survived the journey at sea,
have no identity documents and are unable to work legally.
With no citizenship, they have no right to education or health care.
And even if they were to be deported, there'd be nowhere to deport them too
because the Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship in Myanmar 30 years ago,
before Ambia was even born.
She is stateless, living in geopolitical purgatory,
and she's not the only one.
Rohingya women across Southeast Asia share similar stories.
It's reasonable right now
to be talking about genocide prevention in Myanmar,
specifically in Rakhine State.
The Rohingya population has been enduring widespread
and systematic human rights violations,
in some cases as a direct result of state policy.
So it's important for the international community to be having this conversation now.
While the international community has largely been silent on issues
directly related to the trafficking of women and girls,
Mr. Noor has begun to speak out on the subject of marriage trafficking.
He's become a symbol of resistance to persecution from many Rohingya refugees.
I think if these things continue, another 30-40 years,
I think there will be no such thing called Rohingya culture.
Slowly, slowly fading out, we are like the sunset now.
Everything is shutting down on us.
