MAHAMA (Rwanda): More than a dozen schoolgirls broke down in tears as one told Malala Yousafzai about the rapes they experienced and witnessed while fleeing to Rwanda in 2015 to escape fighting in Burundi.

The 19-year-old Pakistani education activist was visibly moved by the sobbing Burundian refugees.

“It’s extremely shocking,” the world’s youngest Nobel laureate said during a visit to Rwanda’s Mahama refugee camp.

“It’s very tragic their stories, very moving and emotional.”

Burundi has been mired in a year-long crisis that has killed more than 450 people and forced 270,000 to flee since President Pierre Nkurunziza pursued and won a third term. Opponents said his move violated the country’s constitution and a deal that ended a civil war in 2005.

Ange-Mireille Ndikum­wen­ayo was on a bus heading to Rwanda in May 2015 when she saw two girls being gang-raped by the roadside.

“They tried to run and asked for help but no one could help them because they had guns,” said the 20-year-old, referring to the Imbonerakure, the ruling party’s youth wing which rights groups say has attacked and tortured government opponents, charges it denies. “It broke my heart.”

Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, compared the girls to his daughter, recalling how she had cried when she heard on the radio in 2009 that the Taliban in Pakistan had issued an edict banning girls from attending school.

“She cried as you cry,” he said during the visit to the camp on Thursday. “But you know, first you cry, then you scream and then you shout and raise your voice for your rights... When there is night, there is a dawn.”

The majority of the 50,000 Burundian refugees living in Mahama camp in southeastern Rwanda are children.

There are about 12 new arrivals each day, said the United Nations refugee agency’s Paul Kenya, head of Kirehe field office, often children travelling alone.

“Some are being asked now to join the political party and the militia and they are refusing and then they are forced to flee,” he said.

People whose families are known to have fled to Rwanda often fall under suspicion and have to leave as well, he added.

Almost 65 per cent of Mahama’s refugees come from Burundi’s border province of Kirundo as roadblocks make it difficult for people living further south to leave the country, he said.

“They were being beaten to explain why they were fleeing,” he said. “They were accused of being spies.”

Relations between Rwanda and Burundi are tense following a report submitted to the UN Security Council that accused Rwanda of training and financing Burundian rebels, charges Rwanda denies.

The Burundi crisis has sparked concerns it could spiral into an ethnic conflict in a region where memories of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide are fresh.

According to the report, the rebels – including six children – said they had been recruited in Mahama camp, an issue that Malala raised on Wednesday with Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

“It is their age to get education... not [to be] sent back as fighters to their country,” she said.

Published in Dawn, July 16th, 2016