Refugee schools torched

FOUR Unicef schools for Rohingya children in refugee camps in Bangladesh were destroyed in a fire, officials said last Tuesday (19), with the UN children’s agency calling it arson.

It was unclear who might attack the schools, which were empty at the time, but the security situation in the camps housing around a million people has worsened in recent months.

Earlier this month, a blaze thought to have been started by a gas stove burned down hundreds of bamboo shacks in one of the camps, leaving thousands of the refugees from Myanmar homeless.

Razwan Hayat, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, said he believed the latest fire wasn’t started deliberately and said the schools were made of flimsy flammable materials. “We are investigating. We think it’s an accident. These centres are not permanent structures,” he said.

However, Unicef said on Twitter the incident was arson and that it was “working with partners to assess the damages of the attack and speed up the process of rebuilding these learning centres”.

Unicef runs about 2,500 learning centres in the 34 refugee camps in Bangladesh’s border district of Cox’s Bazar. Some 240,000 Rohingya children studied in them before the pandemic. They have been closed for months because of measures to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus but are expected to open again from next month, aid workers say.