Mud and misery for refugees as Bangladesh tent city grows
kutupalong — Two hours’ walk from the nearest road, with no toilets or clean water and little proper shelter, the vast area of scrubland Bangladesh has set aside for more than 400,000 Rohingya refugees is a miserable place to call home.
Over the last week, Bangladesh authorities have cleared hundreds of thousands of newly-arrived refugees from roadsides and private land near the border with Myanmar where they had set up camp, and ordered them to head for the 2,000-acre site, an extension of the largest existing camp at Kutupalong.
But almost nothing has been set up for them there.
Bangladesh has for decades been home to Rohingya refugees who live in camps run by the United Nations where they have access to food, sanitation and clean water.
But the poor, overpopulated country is no haven for the estimated 480,000 Rohingya who have arrived in the last month after fleeing violence that the UN has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
The unprecedented speed and scale of the latest influx has completely overwhelmed the existing camps.
Some of the new arrivals, who now make up the majority of the refugees in Bangladesh, have been
they need everything — they need food, they need clean water, they need shelter, they need proper health care Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees
taken in by relatives already in those camps, others by local families.
But many more have had to fend for themselves and have headed to the new site known as the Kutupalong Extension, where tents set up by the UN refugee agency quickly filled up.
Newer arrivals have had to haul bamboo poles and tarpaulins up steep, muddy slopes and across rivers swollen by the recent monsoon rains to build makeshift shelters that appear unlikely to survive the upcoming cyclone season.
Those makeshift shelters now stretch as far as the eye can see — even though the United Nations says the site, allocated by the government just 10 days ago, is unfit for habitation.
Every year, cyclones batter this part of the Bangladesh coast, and the season is just weeks away.
As if that wasn’t enough, the area is part of a forest reserve that is home to elephants. Last week two elderly Rohingya refugees were trampled to death as they slept in another part of the reserve.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, who visited the area over the weekend, said he had been struck by “the incredible magnitude” of the refugees’ needs. —