I had just said goodbye to a young woman named Rajuma and watched her — a frail figure in a red veil — disappear into a crowd with one of the most horrible stories I had ever heard.
I’ve covered genocide in Sudan and children being blown apart in Iraq. I’ve been dispatched to earthquakes, hurricanes, civil wars, international wars, insurgencies and famines. As foreign correspondents, this is what we do, rush into the world’s biggest disasters. In 20 years of doing this, I’ve become a specialist in despair.
But Rajuma’s story stopped me.
She told me (and everything she said was consistent with dozens of other witness accounts) that Myanmar government soldiers stormed into her village in August and burned down each house. They separated the men from the women and summarily executed the men. Then they raped the women.
But before raping her, Rajuma said, the soldiers snatched her baby boy from her arms and threw him into a fire. The baby was screaming for her as he burned to death.
