Empty bellies
Hunger gnaws at Rohingya children in Bangladesh’s refugee camps.
BALUKHALI: In the sweltering heat of this Bangladesh’s dusty refugee camp, seven-month-old Mahmoud Rohan is burning up.
“I am worried about him,” said his 25-year-old mother Roshida Begum, in the waiting room of a malnutrition screening centre.
“He got a fever last night but I couldn’t reach help. I was told to come here,” she said.
Along with an estimated 625,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who have fled Myanmar for camps in Bangladesh since late August, Begum is struggling to feed herself and her baby.
The exodus began when coordinated Rohingya insurgent attacks sparked a ferocious military response, with the fleeing people accusing security forces of arson, killings and rape.
The top UN human rights official said on Tuesday that Myanmar’s security forces might be guilty of genocide against the Rohingya.
Myanmar has rejected accusations of ethnic cleansing and has labelled Rohingya militants as terrorists.
While now safe from the threat of violence, refugees in Bangladesh now face malnutrition on an “alarming scale”, say aid agencies.
Health workers suspect tiny Mahmoud, who wears an oversized red sports shirt, has severe acute malnutrition – the most serious form of malnourishment.
All he had to eat in the camp for the past two months was a few spoonfuls of rice mixed with sugar a day, said his mother.
At home in Maungdaw township in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, Roshida – who is unable to breastfeed properly – fed Mahmoud with rice water.
As a health worker examined him, the circumference of his spindly upper arm indicated the severity of his condition.
Around him, other mothers, some wearing black niqabs, sit on benches holding their babies in the small bamboo-walled centre.
Dressed in rags, eight-year-old Sadril Amin brought his malnourished sister, 16-month-old Boila Amin, for a check up.
Their mother was sick and their father was at the market, the little boy said through a translator.
Nearly a quarter of all the children in the camps, aged between six months and five years, were malnourished, an analysis conducted by Unicef found.
Worse, it found around 7.5% of the 17,000 youngsters were affected by severe acute malnutrition.
Children make up around 40% of the refugee influx, and are particularly vulnerable to starvation’s effects. — Reuters