‘I’ve never seen such human desperation’
“We live in a blessed city.” FRED WITTEVEEN NATIONAL DIRECTOR, WORLD VISION BANGLADESH
A plastic and bamboo tent city has emerged overnight in a space roughly the size of the neighbourhood of Jane and Finch — two to three families, of at least five members each, occupying one tent. There is no open space; just people. Welcome to Cox’s Bazar, a fishing port at the southernmost tip of Bangladesh, now home to one of the largest exodus of refugees ever witnessed by aid workers in the region — 60 to 80 per cent of whom are women and children from the Rohingya minority in neighbouring Burma.
They’ve been forced to flee after the Burmese military launched indiscriminate attacks against the Rohingya communities on Aug. 25 — a crackdown that’s been decried by the United Nations as “ethnic cleansing.”
To get to Cox’s Bazaar, women have trekked for hundreds of kilometres from their burned-down villages in Burma, barefoot, for days, while pregnant or accompanied with small kids. They’ve come with no food or supplies — just the clothes on their back and memories of vanished villages and the corpses of their husbands and fathers.
“I’ve never seen such human desperation,” said Fred Witteveen, the national director of World Vision Bangladesh, who was back in Toronto for the Thanksgiving weekend. “We live in a blessed city,” he said, “But there, no matter how much we respond, there is still a gap.”
“People are living just to survive,” Witteveen added. “We need a very holistic approach so we can contribute much more.”
Witteveen and World Vision are among a handful of aid agencies increasingly concerned for the immensity of relief efforts needed, for physical well-being, as well as mental and psychological needs.
“Refugees’ needs are still under-diagnosed,” he said.
Silke Buhr, senior spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (WFP) agrees. The morning of Sept. 27, she stumbled across an old woman, Zoreena, and premature baby in a community tent in one of the old refugee camps in the area.
Zoreena and her pregnant daughter had been walking 11 days when they reached river that serves as the no man’s land between Burma and Bangladesh.
There, in sight of the refugee camp they were heading to, Zoreena’s daughter gave birth to her grandson. His mother, extremely weak from labour, was taken to a local clinic. Zoreena begged other young mothers in the shelter to nurse the tiny baby boy until his mother gets better.
“He’s a perfect symbol really,” says Buhr, her voice emotional from telling the story.
“These are stateless people, they don’t have Myanmar citizenship to begin with, they haven’t gotten Bangladeshi citizenship now. I don’t know where he’s from.
“The window to help these women and children is getting very small,” said Himaloy Joseph Mree, the communications officer for World Vision, speaking from Bangladesh.
“The longer their needs are not met adequately, the greater the risks of fatal outbreaks will be something like we’ll never have seen.”