Fires
Fire in Rohingya refugee camp: thousands homeless
Huts made of bamboo and tarpaulins: Fires keep breaking out in the Rohingya camps. photo
© Shafiqur Rahman/AP/dpa
Dramatic incident: Around 7,000 Rohingya lose their homes in a fire overnight in Bangladesh. The fire department battled the flames for several hours.
A fire in an overcrowded Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh left around 7,000 people homeless overnight.
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said that almost 800 huts were destroyed. In addition, 120 facilities such as educational centers, mosques, health centers as well as latrines and bathing facilities were completely or partially damaged. It took firefighters three hours to put out the fire early in the morning. There were therefore no reports of injuries or deaths.
Around a million Rohingya live in the world’s largest concentration of refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazaar district of southeastern Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands fled their Buddhist-majority homeland of Myanmar in 2017 when the military launched an offensive against the Muslim minority. The UN describes their persecution as genocide.
The poor country of Bangladesh still hopes that they will return to Myanmar. So far, however, several attempts at repatriation have failed due to security concerns for the refugees. They were denied citizenship by a law passed in 1982. This made them the largest stateless group in the world, according to UNHCR, despite having lived in Myanmar (formerly Burma) for generations.
Fires keep breaking out in the Rohingya camps and the affected people then have to rebuild their huts, which are often made of bamboo and tarpaulins, with the support of aid organizations. They often live there without prospects or hope for a better future.