Rajiya (15 Days)
Bangladesh

Rajiya was born in 2019 in Save the Children’s primary health care centre in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. When we met her, she was just fifteen days old. Her mother fled to Bangladesh in August 2017 with hundreds of thousands of her fellow Rohingya people, escaping the brutal violence in Myanmar. A UN fact­finding mission reported serious human rights violations against the stateless Muslim minority. Some 300,000 Rohingya had already found refuge in Bangladesh after earlier attacks. But this poverty-stricken country does not want to allow these Rohingya refugees, now numbering 1 million, to settle here permanently.

Rajiya's mother saw the dead on the road at the time - adults and children wrapped in  red cloths of Buddhist monks. “It was the military,” she says. “We almost died of fear when we saw the carnage. Wouldn’t you have been scared?”

The ongoing violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar is the cause of Rajiya being born in Kutupalong, currently the largest refugee camp in the world. Her young mother, along with other members of the stateless Muslim minority, flees to Bangladesh to escape brutal attacks by the police and military. Like most of them, Rajiya's mother ends up in the million-dollar camp near Cox's Bazar. There, in the mother and child ward of Save the Children, the girl, who weighs just 2.6 kilos, will be born in 2019.

How long both will stay is uncertain. The government of Bangladesh does not want to settle the Rohingya permanently. However, a return to Myanmar also remains out of the question for the time being. Will Rajiya spend her life in the camp? Or as an outcast in Myanmar? Or will she be lucky and live a self-determined life? Rajiya will receive in Kutupalong “whatever Allah gives her,“ her mother says. That includes the emergency humanitarian aid that Save the Children and many other organizations have been providing since 2017.

For many months, Dr.Gerd Müller, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, exhibited the pictures in this book in his ministry. Among them was the photograph of little Rajiya - for the committed minister more than just a photograph.