Rohingya refugees, employed as extras in BBC TV drama, relive horror of being forced from their homes
Desperate exiles in Malaysia take roles in harrowing reconstruction to feed their families
The young mother is close to tears as she describes the fear and panic she felt as she waded through thigh-deep river water with her two-year-old daughter in her arms, surrounded by other fleeing refugees.
“I was very afraid because I can’t swim,” says Habibah Abdullah, recalling the mass flight of Muslim Rohingya families. “Babies were crying and children all around me were screaming, ‘Mummy, mummy.’ One man collapsed in the water because of the heat.”
Her harrowing account has a depressingly familiar ring to it amid the avalanche of reports of the horrors endured by the Rohingya people now crowded in refugee camps in Bangladesh after fleeing burnt-out villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Only Habibah’s story is different.
She is not describing a real-life flight to Bangladesh, but rather a reconstruction of her people’s ordeal filmed in Malaysia for a BBC drama featuring a glamorous British soap opera star.
Our Girl, starring former Coronation Street actor Michelle Keegan, follows the fortunes of a female British Army medic working in war zones and hot spots around the world. Our heroine, Lance Corporal Georgie Lane, has saved locals and flown the Union flag in Kenya and Nepal, and the fourth series of the show, to be aired this year, will see Keegan dashing to the aid of Rohingya Muslims.
By filming in Malaysia, the BBC was able to recruit extras from the tens of thousands of Rohingya who have fled Myanmar for the Muslim country in recent years, most of them now living in dire poverty in rundown quarters of the capital, Kuala Lumpur.