Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Landslides in Bangladesh add to Rohingya misery
Aid workers rush to get refugees away from danger
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — If it hadn’t been for her neighbors, Toyoba Khatun almost certainly would be dead.
The 65-year-old Rohingya refugee was buried alive on June 10 after her home collapsed in the first rains of the monsoon. A video of her rescue shows her face weary with exhaustion as men dig frantically to pull her from the mud that minutes before had been a part of the hill on which she lived.
“Allah didn’t take me, but he could have,” Khatun said a few days later, still weakened by the ordeal.
Bamboo and tarpaulin are all that the Rohingya — hundreds of thousands of whom crossed into Bangladesh after fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar — have as shelter from the heavy rains and cyclones that lash the region each year. The rains have already caused 100 landslides this season, most of which were small in scale, and aid agencies estimate 185,000 people are at immediate risk of being caught in the landslides or floods in the coming months as storms batter the world’s largest refugee camp.
Concerns over shelter are just the beginning. Aid workers fear that rains could cut off homes from receiving food, gas and medical help. Young refugees are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. Latrines could collapse into the muck, creating a sanitation nightmare. Cases of diphtheria — a disease that has now nearly vanished in the West but has made a comeback in the camps — could see a catastrophic surge as immunity declines.
Aid groups have been preparing for this since February by leveling hills and relocating a fraction of the most vulnerable people to homes on safer land. But space is tight — Bangladesh’s government has allocated a limited amount of land for refugees — so at best, only 40 percent of those at risk will be relocated this monsoon season, said Frederic Cussigh, senior field coordinator for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR.
Those who remain in high-risk areas are buttressing their homes with sandbags or moving into mosques to stay safe.
But the rains are still causing damage, and they will only get more intense as the season progresses.
One night last week, Soyeda Khatun’s 3-year-old son died when their home collapsed in a landslide. Khatun became trapped and could not free her son, who was buried in the mud.
“I was screaming to save my children, I was asking for help,” she said, still injured and weak in her home, which was rebuilt by aid workers.
When the toddler was found, he was already dead.
Since the exodus from Myanmar began in August, the refugees have lived in shelters cut haphazardly into hillsides — a necessary solution that was supposed to be temporary as tens of thousands arrived each day. But in the process of building the shelters, refugees uprooted trees that held the soil in place and used the mud as the foundation for the bamboo frames of their homes, wherever they found space.
Humanitarian workers say they are battling the clock to make homes safer.
On Monday, aid workers began moving an entire neighborhood — 21 families — to newly built shelters on leveled ground.
Around 15,000 people like Noor Ayesha, 46, have already moved, but aid workers said the departures are happening too slowly. By the end of June, 7,000 more will be relocated.
The refugees cannot yet return home. Plans for repatriation to Myanmar have stalled because the nation’s government refuses to grant citizenship to Rohingya.
Bangladesh plans to relocate 100,000 refugees to a low-lying, uninhabited silt island by August. But the U.N. has called for an independent assessment of the island to ensure it is safe and that Rohingya are free to move to and from the island.