[Rohingya survivors and human rights groups accuse Burmese forces of torching villages, raping women and killing civilians in response to a series of attacks by a Rohingya insurgent group. Doctors Without Borders estimated in December that at least 6,700 were killed in the first month of the crackdown. Burma has denied many of the allegations.]
By
Jason Patinkin
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British aid workers say that
just a few hours of rain in late April “completely transformed”
Balukhali camp. They fear they
may be cut off from supporting hundreds of thousands
of Rohingya refugees once
monsoon season hits the country.
(Jemma Crew/PA Wire/PA Images)
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The refugee shoved sandbags into the edge of
a cliff in a sprawling Bangladeshi camp, a likely futile effort to hold
together the loose soil where his hut of bamboo and plastic sheets was perched
precariously.
Days earlier, a few feet of the hillside had
broken away in a cascade of earth. No one was hurt, but it was a wake-up call.
“I cannot stay here. I have children,” said
Hamit Hussein, a Rohingya Muslim who has lived in the camp since August. “The
hill is collapsing in the dry season. If it rains even a little, it will be
destroyed.”
In Bangladesh, the world’s largest refugee
camp is literally falling apart. With the annual cyclone and monsoon seasons
approaching this month and next, hundreds of thousands of refugees are steeling
themselves for the camp’s further collapse.
But most, like Hussein, have nowhere else to
go.
Since August, some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims
from Buddhist-majority Burma have poured onto a thin spit of land in
southeastern Bangladesh, fleeing a brutal crackdown by Burma’s army that the
United Nations has called ethnic cleansing.
Rohingya survivors and human rights groups
accuse Burmese forces of torching villages, raping women and killing civilians
in response to a series of attacks by a Rohingya insurgent group. Doctors
Without Borders estimated in December that at least 6,700 were killed in the
first month of the crackdown. Burma has denied many of the allegations.
Now the Rohingya face another threat. The
Bangladeshi camps — carved out of jungle — have become overcrowded slums of
flimsy shelters teetering on steep, unstable slopes. Aid groups warn that the
approaching storm seasons could prove deadly. Last year, before the latest
influx of refugees, a cyclone damaged 70 percent of the shelters in the camps.
“Our initial mapping study showed 120,000 at
grave risk of floods and landslides,” said Fiona MacGregor, spokeswoman for the
United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. But she added:
“Pretty much everyone is at risk to some extent.”
In recent weeks, the season’s first few
squalls turned valleys into swamps and shredded dozens of shelters.
“The tarp was stripped off by wind and the
house was destroyed. Dishes, my stoves, everything,” Rukiya Begum said while
standing in the frame of her hut, a loose plastic sheet flapping overhead. “I’m
afraid to stay here.”
The earth here is fine sand packed into hard
dunes that disintegrate at a touch. Small landslides are common on the
deforested slopes and have killed at least two children. Many areas have no
proper drainage or access roads for ambulances.
“The fact that it looks unprepared is
absolutely how it really is,” said Tess Elias, country director in Bangladesh
for the Danish Refugee Council, an aid group managing parts of the camps.
With worse weather to come, Doctors Without
Borders is stockpiling bandages and intravenous fluids for mass-casualty events
and warns of disease outbreaks if floodwaters overflow latrines, turning
low-lying areas into festering pools of rainwater and human waste.
Marcella Kraay, the aid group’s project
coordinator in the region, warned of outbreaks of acute watery diarrhea, also
known as cholera: “It’s going to be humid, wet, unsanitary conditions.”
For now, Bangladesh’s government has refused
to allow refugees the freedom of movement that might allow them to find safer
places to live beyond the camp’s boundaries.
Aid workers complain that the authorities,
wary of establishing a long-term presence of hundreds of thousands of refugees
in an already densely populated nation, have mostly banned the use of stronger
building materials such as cement, relegating the refugees to shelters made of
bamboo and plastic.
But if the government appears inflexible,
foreign aid groups suffer from their own troubles.
A March report by a consortium of British aid
groups called the Disasters Emergency Committee described a “substandard” and
“chaotic” response to the Rohingya refugee crisis, with a cumbersome
bureaucracy amid confusion about which U.N. relief agency should be in charge.
Still, the biggest issue is a lack of space.
So far, some 14,000 of the most vulnerable refugees have been moved to safer
areas within the camp, but more land is needed for all at-risk people to find
safer ground.
Work crews on the camp’s western boundary are
flattening 123 acres for further relocations, but that space, meant to be
finished by June, will hold only 13,000 to 16,000 people.
“That’s clearly not enough, but that’s where
we are,” said Mark Pierce, head of the Save the Children aid group in
Bangladesh.
Another option, floated by Bangladesh’s
government, is to move 100,000 refugees to an island in the Bay of Bengal. The
Bangladeshi navy is overseeing construction of what the government says will be
a better home for the Rohingya.
But the plan is controversial. The island,
called Bhasan Char, is more of a massive sandbar cut by canals and in constant
flux amid shifting ocean currents. Serazul Mustafa, a Rohingya leader in the
largest camp, called Kutupalong, said he feared the sea journey to the island
would be dangerous.
In internal reports, first revealed by
Reuters and confirmed by The Washington Post, aid groups including the U.N.
refugee agency raised concerns that the island might become a trap for
refugees, where they could be exposed to storms and be at risk of human
trafficking.
Caroline Gluck, spokeswoman for the U.N.
refugee agency in Bangladesh, said the agency had not yet visited Bhasan Char
and so could not confirm that it was habitable. She called for an independent
assessment of the island to ensure that it is safe and said the refugees should
have freedom of movement on the island and to and from the mainland.
Wherever land is made available, however,
many refugees, traumatized by their first displacement from Burma, are refusing
to move again.
Kabir Ahmed said he declined a chance to move
west, even though his home was threatened by a crumbling wall, because he
feared elephants and thieves near the camp’s outskirts.
Instead, he opted to shift his shelter just a
few meters away, safe from the wall, but downhill from a latrine with no drain
and above a stagnant wastewater ditch.
“What can I say?” he said. “We were forced to
flee here. We just need to deal with it.”
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