Aid staff ’s plea to Britain: Don’t forget Rohingya year on from mass exodus
Aid workers have begged Britain not to forget almost one million Rohingya stranded in makeshift refugee settlements a year after the most recent mass exodus from Myanmar.
Fiona Macgregor has been in southern Bangladesh since December with the Internationalorganisationformigration (IOM), after hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled violence in Myanmar – formerly Burma – last August.
The UN agency is one of the biggest medical providers in the camps, having carried out more than half a million consultations, and is also coordi- nating the management of the weather-beaten site.
Ms Macgregor, from Edinburgh, praised the “extraordinary” response of the international community, which helped protect the Rohingya during months of heavy monsoon rains, but said more funding is needed to avert another disaster.
Speaking from Cox’s Bazar, she said: “We are desperately short of funding, and a year on ... for me the message is ‘Don’t forget Rohingya, don’t turn your back on them’, because a year ago the international response was so generous, and the government of Bangladesh and local communities have been extraordinary in their generosity in the way they’ve welcomed people in, and we’ve done all this work, but if we can’t keep on doing the work then we’re facing another disaster.”