FORSAKEN and driven out by their home country Myanmar, tens of thousands of Rohingya are struggling to survive in Bangladesh’s border districts amid scarcities of food, clean water and medical care, mostly for children and elderly people.
In a desperate flight to escape brutal military persecution, men, women and children in the thousands have walked for miles, travelled on rickety fishing boats or waded through the Naf River — the river that divides Bangladesh and Myanmar.
“I saw houses being burned down and left behind all our belongings… my father was killed in front of us,” 12-year-old Nurul Islam said as he reached the Teknaf border in Bangladesh on Sept 13.
“In a bid to escape with my mother and younger brother, we walked almost a week to reach Bangladesh following a trail of people streaming out of Rakhine State villages for cover.”
Islam is one of over 400,000 Rohingya who have made the arduous journey to neighbouring Bangladesh in the past three weeks. Many of them were shot dead, drowned in the river or blown up by landmines placed in their path of escape.
Yet, every hour, the number of new arrivals is rising. There seems to be no end to the steady flow of Rohingya carrying sacks of belongings — whatever they could save from burning — or children on their shoulders or laps, or carrying weaker elderly people on their back or bamboo yokes. As they arrived, they were devastated, but happy to find themselves still alive, at least for the time being.
But, aid groups, both local and international, warn that this already overpopulated, impoverished South Asian nation is now overwhelmed by the sudden influx of refugees.
They said lack of food and medical aid are leading to a humanitarian catastrophe as starving or half-fed people arrive already suffering from malnutrition, and an inadequate safe water supply and poor sanitation facilities could cause breakouts of waterborne diseases.
“We’ve already detected many cases of skin or diarrhoeal diseases,” Dr Ibrahim Molla, a physician from Dhaka Community Hospital now aiding refugees in Cox’s Bazar, said.
The Untied Nations refugee agency The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and International Organisation for Migration (IOM) held a joint press conference in Dhaka last Thursday, where officials estimated the number of Rohingya might reach one million as their influx continued.
The latest round of the Rohingya crisis unfolded as Myanmar’s army conducted a brutal crackdown on “Rohingya militants”, who attacked a security outpost, killing soldiers in the last week of August. Though not independently verified, according to eyewitness accounts of fleeing Rohingya, the Myanmar army torched village after village, the homes of ethnic Rohingya Muslims, in reprisal, killing hundreds.
Myanmar authorities denied the allegations, but satellite images released by a number of international rights groups corroborated the claim made by the Rohingya refugees.
In addition to arson, the Myanmar soldiers were also accused of raping Rohingya women.
Local people in Teknaf also said they saw huge fires and black smoke billowing across the Naf River from the Myanmar side several times.
The UN refugee agency chief called the situation a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” in Rakhine State in Myanmar.
It was not the first time the Rohingya, mostly Muslims, have been targeted and faced discrimination in their hometowns in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they lived for centuries. In the past few decades, they have been stripped of citizenship, denied basic rights and made stateless, leading the UN to describe them as “the most persecuted people on earth”.
As the Rohingya crossed the border after their death-defying trudge to Bangladesh’s southeast districts of Cox’s Bazar and Bandarban, many had no safe shelter, food or drinking water in a country of 160 million people, though Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina promised to accommodate all on humanitarian grounds.
Though many countries started sending aid and others made promises, many Rohingya refugees are starving or passing days half-fed. Those who were strong enough to jostle fared the best as local volunteers distributed limited amounts of food and water.
In many places when trucks carrying aid were spotted, starving people blocked them and desperately tried to grab food. The distribution process turned risky as the inexperienced volunteers threw food to the crowd of refugees from the trucks.
As they scuffled for food and water, many people were injured in stampedes or caned by the people given responsibility to discipline the refugees crowding for aid.
Thousands of Rohingya, mostly women and children, took refuge on the sides of roads or other empty spaces under open sky. Some of those who were lucky could manage a sheet of polythene to save them from heavy monsoon rains that flooded a third of Bangladesh in August.
The Bangladesh government has already demarcated an area in Cox’s Bazar to build new refugee camps and started mandatory registration of Rohingya before giving them official status as refugees.
The UN Children’s Fund said more than 200,000 Rohingya children were at risk and hundreds of unaccompanied Rohingya children, separated from parents and relatives in the ongoing violence in Rakhine State, were in Cox’s Bazar and looking for family members. Many of these children are traumatised by terrifying memories of murders and arson and their experience while fleeing.
Save the Children in Bangla-desh said in a statement on Sept 17 that a shortage of food, shelter, water and basic hygiene support might cause another catastrophe.
“Apart from diarrhoea and skin diseases, different types of communicable diseases might spread fast here,” warned Dr Molla, adding that the shortage of space the refugees had for living and poor hygiene support were to blame. IPS
The writer is the deputy editor (News) for ‘New Age’, an English language national daily published from Dhaka, Bangladesh.