Since the outbreak of violence in
Myanmar’s Rakhine State in August last year over 1 million Rohingya refugees
have crossed the border into Bangladesh, fleeing what the UN has called “textbook
ethnic cleansing” by the Myanmar military. Bangladesh, already one of the most
densely populated countries in the world and suffering with widespread poverty,
is largely ill-equipped to deal with such a massive influx of people in such a
short space of time. To give a sense of the scale of the crisis, the Rohingya
settlement in Cox’s Bazar has rapidly become the world’s largest refugee camp, double
the size of Dadaab camp in Kenya, which previously held the record. In July
2017, the two government-run refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar had a combined
population of 34,000 people. Today, Kutupalong camp alone has an estimated
550,000 (compared to Dadaab’s 250,000), with another 25,000 in the neighbouring
Nayapara camp.
The sprawling camps have expanded
exponentially in the past few months to accommodate as many of the fleeing
Rohingya as possible, but even that has not been enough. Many more thousands of
refugees have been forced to set up their own makeshift camps in the
surrounding mountains and hills, and to spread deeper into Bangladesh in search
of a safe space to survive. For those in the tent cities conditions are poor,
with a severe deficit of resources, poor sanitation, and an almost complete
lack of medical equipment for the majority of people. But for those who did not
fit into Kutupalong or Nayapara, conditions are even worse.
A lot of these makeshift villages have been constructed on hills and mountainsides, completely exposed to the
elements. The aid agencies working across Bangladesh are painfully aware of the
approaching monsoon season, set to start in May and run through to September.
On average, 80% of Bangladesh’s annual rainfall usually occurs between June and
October (20 – 30 inches a month at the peak of the monsoon). This brings
widespread devastation after the cold, dry winter that leaves the ground more
vulnerable to flooding. Such flooding is rampant and, for the Rohingya camps
that find themselves on or around the hillsides near Cox’s Bazar, landslides
become a very real threat. UNHCR workers in the area have said that widespread
flooding and unstable ground make landslides an inevitability. It is not if,
but when.
The myriad camps that continue to
appear across Bangladesh are not just in the wrong positions to deal with
landslides, but they are also structurally unprepared to cope with the monsoon
conditions. Camps with hastily-built latrines and sewage systems risk
contamination of their water supply, and many of the tent structures are likely
to be washed away with the mud beneath them. With no respite to the repression
in Myanmar, and nowhere else for the Rohingya to go, these shelters are likely
to become permanent housing for the people living there. It is not uncommon for
refugees to live in camps like these for 20 – 30 years before they can go home
or move on, and so it is vital that food and water supplies are secured for the
long-term. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.
And the threat to the camps does
not end there. Bangladesh’s monsoon season coincides with tropical cyclone
season. Cox’s Bazar, located on the coast, is regularly in the path of
cyclones. In May 2017, Cyclone Mora forced 500,000 people to flee their homes
and damaged 20,000 houses of Rohingya refugees who had previously fled Myanmar.
This was before the current crisis, at a time when the two main camps in Cox’s
Bazar held only 35,000 people between them. Needless to say, a cyclone of that
size this year would cause havoc on an unprecedented scale. The International
Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) successfully
provided aid to the 500,000 people who left their homes before Mora hit,
setting up emergency shelter stations in advance of the cyclone making ground
and deploying volunteers to help with the clean-up in the immediate aftermath.
The scale of the campaign was massive, with around 3.3 million people affected.
However, since then the population of the cyclone-vulnerable region around Cox’s
Bazar has risen by up to a third, with many of the 1 million Rohingya refugees in
Bangladesh settling in and around the area.
Aid agencies are already
stretched to their limits coping with the world’s fastest growing refugee
crisis. The Rohingya have fled their homeland to escape the violence
perpetrated against them by their own military, and, with nowhere else to go,
have ended up in overcrowded and increasingly precarious camps set to be
battered by extreme weather in the upcoming months. Though actual figures are
not available, conservative estimates suggest that at least 50,000 Rohingya
have been killed in the military ‘clearing operations’ in Myanmar and over 1
million have been displaced to Bangladesh alone, with many more fleeing for
Pakistan, India and Indonesia. The nightmare that began in August 2017 is far
from over. And, as several aid agencies have cautioned, the real crisis is
still to come.
For more information on the current crisis and to see how you can help,
visit the IFRC website https://media.ifrc.org/.
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